Wood Sorrel and Dragon Pox
by AmberPalette
Summary: For Draco fans AND Draco haters: What creates a childhood, and, subsequently, an adult? Does it apply to a rich bigot's son too? HELL, YES. Draco's possible childhood experiences, many of them darker than his peers realize, as revealed through the memo


_**Wood Sorrel and Dragon Pox**_

_**A Harry Potter Fanfiction**_

By AmberPalette (Amber Carroll Stitt)

**LONGEST DISCLAIMER EVAH! (BUT PLEASE READ! ) **:

RATED PG to PG-13. There is a Rowling-esque levity/general style to most of this (INCLUDING USE OF CAPS FOR SHOUTING, hah), but there is some heavy content dealt with at the same time. Please exercise discretion!

If you don't know that J.K. Rowling owns the ENTIRE Potter-verse and all its characters (save the fan-created characters featured) then you haven't read her books and I don't know what you are doing reading THIS. I have yet to possess her talent. Thank you for sharing it, Ms. Rowling.

The only characters of Rowling's canon extensively featured in this fanfiction are the Malfoys, although there are many cameos of other characters. BUT! Even if you hate them (or ESPECIALLY if you do), don't run off just yet.

SPOILER WARNING. THIS WORK WAS WRITTEN, AND TAKES PLACE, IN ITS ENTIRETY **BEFORE** THE PUBLICATION OF HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF BLOOD PRINCE. However because certain character developments I have made related to Draco Malfoy correspond alarmingly with events in Ms. Rowling's most recent novel, I HAVE revised my script to include some events of HBP in certain details throughout. I think I had a Sibyll Trelawney moment there when I started this several months ago . ;; Weird…

The PURPOSE of this story will be described in the epilogue. Please do read it, as a small token of appreciation for my sanity ;)

This story is really not a narrative, but rather a series of loosely connected moments that illustrate a point. PAY ATTENTION TO DATES because it is NOT all in chronological order. POV will also shift throughout. THIS IS NOT A LIGHT OR EASY READ. Fair warning!

The non-Rowling characters that I own and that MAY NOT be used without permission: Alexis, Victor, Odile, and Margaret Renard. YES, the fan characters are used to develop plot and illustrate points. NO, they are not CENTRAL elements. I don't do that kind of fanfiction.

Haylin Daire, Susan Collins, and Ragan, USED WITH PERMISSION, © my friend **Lindsay Fisk**.

**Lindsay has written a couple of fanfictions that correspond very closely to the events in this fanfiction, and they can be found on the page of user KrazyHorse83. RIGHT NOW, BEFORE you read my fic, if you want a clearer understanding of her character HAYLIN, go to this page: http/ and read her short story from his perspective. **

I am particularly grateful to member **B-K** (or B-K-11, or just Stacy ) for the inspiration brought by her fanfiction _Happy Hour_ and for the use of a quote from that fanfiction. If you have not read her professional-grade work, make sure your brain is ready for a challenge and go read it NOW.

What the hell is the title all about? By the end it will, I hope, make perfect sense.

_**REVIEWS: always welcome! FLAMES: laughed at and disregarded. CONSTRUCTIVE CRIT: This is a ROUGH DRAFT, but ALSO a ONE-SHOT. In other words, I'm an insanely busy 22-year-old. Goin' to graaaad schoooolll, folks! XD **_

_Mnich: Was Voldemort born evil?__  
JK Rowling replies - I don't believe that anybody was born evil._

_--from Floo Network website, World Book Review online interview with J.K. Rowling_

_"The beginning is the most important part of the work."—Plato_

_"Teach your children well  
Their father's hell did slowly go by  
And feed them on your dreams  
The one they picks, the one you'll know by _

Don't you ever ask them why, if they told you, you would cry  
So just look at them and sigh and know they love you

And you of tender years  
(Can you hear what do you care and)  
Can't know the fears that your elders grew by  
(Do you see what must be free)  
And so please help them with your youth  
(To teach your children you believe)  
They seek the truth before they can die  
(They make a world that we can live in)

_Teach your parents well  
Their children's hell will slowly go by  
And feed them on your dreams  
The one they picks, the one you'll know by _

Don't you ever ask them why, if they told you, you would cry  
So just look at them and sigh and know they love you"

_--Graham Nash_

**Wiltshire, southwest England, July, two summers before the Goblet of Fire **

_" 'I hope my son will amount to more than an thief or plunderer, Borgin,' said Mr. Malfoy coldly . . . 'though if his grades don't pick up,' said Mr. Malfoy, more coldly still, 'that may indeed be all he is fit for.'" –from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling_

"_Perfection_," the sterling-silver-serpent encased mirror purred at the skinny, platinum-haired thirteen-year-old scowling into it.

Both gawky with imposing puberty and soft with remaining childhood, the recipient of the compliment shifted weight in his oversized green silk pajamas. His nostrils flared indignantly, and he cocked his head. His alabaster face mustered—and tainted itself with—a fierce sneer.

But that was the maddening thing about this child: Everything he did was done elegantly, with cool, conceited grace. The ugliest of words were purred from his pouty lips like arrogant poetry, and could be twisted expertly into caustic verbal punches. At his most mortified, his cheeks never flushed crimson. Rather, his pearly white ear tips turned a charming, sweet, ridiculously tasteful shade of peach-pink. He was given to fits of cruel hyperactivity—the hazing of the weaker, the dumber, the poorer, the "less cool"—and those fits were absurdly beautiful. Yes, angelic. He ate angelically, lied angelically, cursed angelically, flew angelically—fell angelically. Justice had certainly hit a drought in the wizarding world the day the Malfoy Dynasty, "_toujours pur,"_ decided to breed, creeping up out of the plunging depths of the Middle Ages by way of a wall-long family tapestry's tentacle-like golden threads.

"Oh? You don't say? Did mother put a Flattering Charm on you?" Draco Malfoy drawled. He examined his face, the cliché of the Aryan cherub: silky sleek thick hair, sharp, straight nose, utter symmetry between his puckish eyebrows. But that was a beauty that also appeared…spent, satiated—a faded photograph, or perhaps, more likely, a portrait painted too pale in the first place. He tugged at his eyelids, rimmed in purple circles, patted his colorless cheeks, and fluffed his icy white-blond locks. His eyes, the liquid gray of sickles at the bottom of a fountain, shimmered at the mirror as if it were being deliberately sarcastic, as if he needed to challenge its sauciness and assert whateverunlikely power was locked inside his scrawny body.

"Oh, sure, ruddy wicked. I mean, really, look at me, the next great Slytherin wizard, ha. I look sick or dead or something. Everyone knows Potty and Weasel and their Mudblood bitch stole my thunder these past two years. Bloody hell, maybe if I had a stupid scar and a sob story about my dead parents, I'd be some hot shite too. And there's no one hereabouts that cares to forget my mistakes, not even over _summer vacation_." His tone acquired a grating and excellently well practiced whininess: which was, of course, somehow angelic.

"Certainly _you_ have not forgotten, Draco," the mirror clucked, causing the scowl on the boy's face to deepen. "You seem slightly _obsessed_ with the accomplishments of your peers and the mistakes of yourself."

"Bugger off," the heir of Malfoy Manor and all its glorious and infamous legacies snapped back. He pouted and drew a thick velvet emerald curtain over the offensively honest lavatory mirror. To hell with it, he could estimate his comeliness in his reflection in the sink water or something. Or not care at all. That seemed like an excellent alternative to everything lately, since caring usually was ignored or belittled or worse, excessively doted upon, in this house. Mansion. Country manor. What the hell ever.

Rubbing those huge dark-circled eyes, Draco padded back into his sprawling bedroom. It was dark, bathed nauseatingly in the sweet musty odor of various herbs and potions and the tickling scent of peppermints, fizzing whizbees, chocolate frogs, and other candies. On a scythe-like hook on the wall ("don't put out your eye, darling, the dinner guests would be appalled," his mother Narcissa had often airily laughed) hung his green velvet night robe, which had been hexed to strangle to death any house elves who might attempt to steal it. Considering a house elf by the name of Blinky did Draco's laundry every other afternoon, this often caused an irritating cacophony in his bedroom, but father refused to lift the charm. Mother had brought a vast assortment of other possessions from her unspeakable male cousin's childhood home, Grimmauld Place, to Malfoy Manor. Draco had unwillingly been bequeathed with half of these items from his harpy-like great aunt Black ("Draco, why aren't you thanking your mother for all these gifts? _SMILE_, _you_ _spoiled wret-ched boy, you scum of my forefathers etc etc_!"): among these items, wartcap powder from the chief house elf Kreacher, who resembled some impossibly infernal mixture of maniacal goblin and horse's ass; a china tea set bearing the Black family crest and motto; a twitching, scowling portrait of a severe-looking distant maternal great grandmother, Araminta Meliflua; and a double-set of tweezers with sharp ends that wriggled about like spiders under the Imperius Curse. These things really unsettled him as a six and seven year old at night, when they scuttled about the perimeters of his room, rubbing their feelers together menacingly over his pillows, but as he grew older, he also found them morbidly fascinating.

The air in the spacious chamber was cool, and the rich décor was covered from shears to bedpost to carpet in green and silver, like the rest of the tediously Slytherin-infatuated house. Mansion. Country manor. _Dammit._ What the hell _ever_.

Was it _really_ possible to be sick of having _everything_?

Well, but _did _he?

And if not, what was missing?

_Dammit, shut up, brain, I'm not a bloody Ravenclaw philosopher_.

The Hogwarts School Governor's son grumbled a fluid stream of curses introduced to him over the years by friend and crony Vincent Crabbe, ripping through his mahogany (_and YES_, he scoffed, _SILVER-and-JADE –handled_!) dresser drawers for a white designer t-shirt and sweatshorts from his mother's last spree at Gladrags Wizardwear in Hogsmeade. Upon their discovery he flung them on and clawed his hair back in place. It was sweltering in the sprawling fields and gardens outside, so he hoped fervently for some means of skulking past his father's critical eye and the resultant demand that he wear the multi-layered woolen Malfoy Family Robes and Crest out in public, if only for the house elves and other outdoor servants to see. The climate had rarely dissuaded Lucius Malfoy in the past.

Draco seized his Nimbus 2001, and, while thoughts of father's judgments were fresh, the green Malfoy signet ring also bestowed upon him on his thirteenth birthday. If he were wearing this, then perhaps Lucius would be more lenient. Well, or he could be even nastier, and say that the outfit was only partially complete, and accuse his boy of lacking pride in the family name. It was equally possible.

Draco fiddled with the ring on his right third finger and _nearly_ removed it before sighing, deciding to chance it, and slinking downstairs.

As no obstacle, not even the likes of their former servant Dobby's mates, presented itself, his slithering gait became wide, careless, joyful bounds towards the sprawling front door of the….house…. manor…._whatever!_ _HAPPINESS! _

_"Draco!" _

_TERROR!_

"….Father."

A hissing sigh, and then a cold, low, sing-songy, "Well, come _here_, dear boy."

Draco couldn't see the obsidian robes or the long, silver-blond gossamer hair, or the eyes that were simply older, narrower variants of his own, but that made no difference. He had been snagged.

He obediently followed the deep, wet-silk-and-thunder voice with acid creeping almost musically in and out of the undertones. It led him to the sprawling drawing room under which a boastful assortment of forbidden Dark Arts artifacts and...equipment….were stored.

"Son," the perfectly groomed man reigning from the drawing room throne, a large—indeed _green_— chenille armchair, spoke, after an eternal silence leafing through trivial newspaper headlines, during which the boy stood at his feet. It was in this situation and this situation alone that Draco's sarcastically seraphim poise left him and he was reduced to his true state: that of a shivering, simpering servant. He watched Lucius as would both an eager toddler and a fawn catching its first sight of a wolf. The king of Malfoy Manor sipped from an ebony teacup containing a steaming murky liquid that smelled like soured butterbeer. He cleared his throat elegantly, and continued, "Surely you weren't thinking of leaving without at least telling me good morning. You know…a bit later this afternoon, I will need you to draft some of my parchments to Mr. Fudge for me, and send them on owl post with Julius. The time's come when it does no good to keep you in the dark about…_things_…and newspaper clippings do little good except while you are at school….thus the best way to memorize pertinent information is to write it down. Verbatim."

At last, following this string of softly drawling rumination, Draco's father dropped the newspaper to his black-clad lap. He didn't bother to fold it and discard it on the oak-and-white gold coffee table, as if anything his son possibly had to say were not truly going to occupy his attention long enough to be rid of the entertainment of his reading. "Well? Don't you agree, son?" He clicked his tongue once, then smiled derisively. His eyes drank in his progeny from head to toe, and he reached up and, casually, gracefully, smoothed some of his own loose flowing, slick blond mane out of those belittling gray jewels.

Draco's skin crawled. _Too calm. _"Of course, dad."

"_Dad_?" Lucius caught the mistake at once, spitting the word back into his son's face as though he'd fed him a rancid dragon egg. One sharp eyebrow arched aristocratically on his otherwise expressionless face.

"_Father_. Of course, father." Draco blinked angrily, silently chastising himself; it was Ron the Weasel's fault, he was in all of Draco's classes this past semester and he always referred to that insufferable Arthur Weasley as "dad." The same went for Potty, always talking glowingly about his idiot dead "dad." How stupidly, disgustingly familiar, how cutesy, "dad" sounded. He much preferred "father," he did…. He saw, out of his peripheral vision, one of Great Aunt Black's silver spider contraptions skittering along the fireplace mantle. He felt like laughing and squirming all at once.

"Good. Make sure you bring up a bottle of ink to my study 'round four or five. So. Go on, then. What are you up to today, boy?" The room temperature dropped twenty more degrees as Lucius's already impoverished patience drained.

"Oh, sorry." _Damn it_. _Where's Mum when I need her? Oh, right, like she'd raise a finger—she only does that BEFORE father's annoyed at me. Then when he's in the process, she shakes her head at me all indulgently and says 'naughty boys will be naughty boys' or the less charitable 'you practically ask for Father's irritation, Draco.' Never bloody mind. _" I was going to go out and, um, practice some Quidditch on the new broom, you know." As if Lucius needed the demonstration, his son eagerly gestured with his left hand, tightly grasping his new toy. "Yeah, um, and try some of those old, um, moves where I raced with the, um, the Muggle helicopters and scared the pilots. Um, yeah."

_And why the hell did "um" become so prominent a part of his vocabulary when his father was staring at him like that? Dammit. He waxed poetic to everyone else. He was a supernova, a star, everywhere else! _

"Maybe you could come out and watch me, father, and…."

"Perhaps when I'm less busy, Draco. You know I've a lot on my plate at the Ministry these days. Why do you think I am asking for your help this afternoon, boy?"

Draco's chest tightened with small surge of anger. _Liar, you're just practicing your Unforgivables while I scrawl down your damn bureaucratic busy work_….. Then guilt. _Dammit, he loves practicing those, they make him happy like you can't, so shut up, brain_.

The light was beating through the leaden glass windows into the study smotheringly. It hit only Draco's head and face, so that he had to squint through narrowed pupils to see his father, and so that his cheeks and ears felt on fire while the rest of him chilled. Like a summer evening really.

_Hum. He never lifted me up on his shoulders on Midsummer's Eve to watch the fireflies like Crabbe's dad did…I got chigger bites on my ankles and hid in mum's peppermint and lavender scented robes and scratched my toes on the hard English beachside grass and heard Vincent Crabbe Sr. chortling at his boy about how Oberon the Fairy King was somewhere among the greenish-yellowish-orangish blinking lights…Look Vinnie, I bet it's that fat amber colored one…_

_Father, do you think Mr. Crabbe is right?_

_What? Oh. No need to pinch me, Cissa! Er yes, son, indubitably._

_Well, can I get a better look? _

_Be my guest, go get your broom. I doubt you'll fall off. You've sufficient skill now._

_But I meant…_

_Go get your expensive new broom which cost me two weeks' salary and which you will ride PROUDLY, Draco Abraxus Malfoy. My word, as if some thanks weren't in order…_

_Yes, father, um I mean I love it, so much, and I'll go get it, see, watch me… _

_Simper simper. Cajole. Whiiiine. So Lucius Malfoy was busy. Distracted. Too proper for sentimental hogwash. And? _

_I hate him. He never did anything but throw expensive shite at me and tell me to "go play."_

_Ingrate! Don't criticize Dad. Father. Father Father FATHER God damn it! _

_But I…_

"Just keep your diving and turning skills polished." Lucius's lip curled and he pointedly retrieved his newspaper, burying his nose in it. Of course his high plush chair conveniently blocked his platinum head from the sunlight, and his face was clean and cool and free of the sweat Draco felt beading his forehead.

_What? Summer? Fireflies? …The hell did that come from? That was like seven years ago…._

And in the present….Draco almost believed he'd made it off the hook. "I, um, reckon I will, father…um. Bye."

He had turned and made two paces towards the door when the newspaper crackled loudly and that voice cooed, "Wait a minute, dear boy."

Draco turned in terror and clutched his broom, white-knuckled. His father was raising both eyebrows at him, full of astonished glee. It made Draco almost wonder if Lucius had deliberately pretended not to notice his lack of décor at first, to bait his nerves. But then he chastised himself once again for thinking such dreadful thoughts about his own father.

Lucius sucked in his beautiful cheeks and then exhaled, and _tsk_ed twice. He picked up the newspaper, and almost made to stand up.

_Ho God, here it comes. _The Heir of Malfoy was vaguely cognizant that his stomach had inverted in fear and that he might vomit.

_Shut up._

"Draco, where are your robes? You're wearing clothes that would satisfy mudbloods." Lucius sniffed. _Coldly_. The only person Draco knew that could even _inhale mucus_ coldly. A fact which the boy was never sure whether he desperately detested or fervently admired. He'd always been a bit more immediately hot-tempered and impulsive than his father. Among….other things that…needed to be suppressed.

"Oh." Draco looked down, swiftly manufacturing shock. "Oh wow. Thanks for reminding me, father. I'll fetch them straight away." _Yeah, thanks. A fookin' lot. Now you'll rip into me when I dare to be weak enough to pass out and fall off my broom from fookin' bloody heatstroke. And mum will stand by and purse her stupid lips and go 'oh deah deah, my pohwah deah boy.' Shite, don't be mad at them. It's your own fault you're so bloody insufficient anyhow. Yours and Saint Potty's. Shite, shite. Damn him. Damn me. _

_Shut up. Shut UP!_

"Fine. So why exactly are you still standing here gawking at _me_, lad?" Father's chilliness brought his son back into orbit, and Draco realized from the impatience and disdain on Lucius's face, the way that he peered slit-eyed over _the Daily Prophet, _that Draco had floated off mentally for quite a considerable moment. "Get your robes and go on out and _play_." The last word was uttered like a disdainful curse in a foreign tongue, and _very_ quietly.

For a split second, Draco felt insurmountable rage on top of his terror, and tried very hard not to bristle. _Yea, indeed. And the Lord did say unto the Child,_ _Bow down, scum that is my son. _

And then Lucius's hand brushed across the sterling snake's-head top of his onyx cane. He smiled.

_And the Child bowed down, and the Lord was pleased. Boo hiss. _

"Of course, father, forgive me for interrupting you." Draco backed groveling out of the room, hoping Lucius would not see his hands violently trembling. He tripped on the hunter green rug at the doorframe with a "whoop!" and snagged his bare knee on a jeweled fireplace poker. He whimpered at the tearing of skin and smacked a hand over his mouth.

_God, shut up, if he hears you_…

"And Draco?"

_Help._

"Yes, father?"

_NO, don't let your voice break like that, he HATES that. _

"…Take good care of that broomstick. Don't go smashing it against the cypress tree or one of your…'heli-copters.' I'm cutting back on your indulgences as you age, don't you know." A distinctive smirk in Lucius's tone, a delight at his son's squirming, but it signified relief to Draco, for it meant the man was happy at the moment, and that he was safe. So he continued dashing madly outside.

_ESCAPE!_

**Paris, July, two summers before the Goblet of Fire**

_"Say how's the weather, so I look out the window  
To brighten my soul, but I can't control the rain  
That keeps falling  
Smile on the outside that never comes in  
A comedy, mystery, irony, tragedy  
So I scream 'let the show begin' _

You break me open, turn on the light

_Stumble inside with me, with me _

Do I entertain you?  
Do I preoccupy you with my wit to cover this lie?  
Are you mesmerized?  
Do you think me faithful, do you think me a clown?  
I picked out this shirt, I put on this hat  
I wore all this paint just for you"

_--Jars of Clay_

A shriek not unlike that of a peahen: "_Alexis Renard, you stole my undergarment!" _

A loud amiable bark: "Fleur DelaCour, a veela's pink polka-dotted thong _cannot_ be disregarded!"

"I am only PART veela, you…_DON'T_ you… I _cannot_ talk to you when you are like _that_, barking and squawking at me! _YOU WICKED BOY_! CHANGE _BACK!"_

_"Arrrrrrk…chkchk…rarark…."_

_"RUDE BOY! _How dare you put my panties between your _teeth!"_

_"Rark."_

"_IMMATURE!"_

_"Garrrrk."_

"CHANGE BACK NOW!" 

The girl stood stiffly, like a beautiful predator fowl, over the black fox whom she had cornered between a shoreside log and a brace of small boys in dark swim trunks. Between the creature's pearly fangs were the endstrings of the blazing dotted pink bikini in question. She straightened her baby powder blue halter and shorts, her manicured fingernails clawing at the twin embroidered capital B's on her chest. She was as pale as a quivering white river lily, and her plait of gossamer hair swished defiantly over her shoulders and back as she tilted her nose skyward. "No, I won't look at you like that. I won't give you the satisfaction, Alexis. Give them back now." Out flung a hand, gesticulating at the creature's little muzzle, while she sighed at the cumulus clouds.

Most of the other guests at the Renard Estate Lake, a crystalline water body sprawling behind the Versailles-style Baroque mansion at which virtual eons of brilliant French wizards had resided, ignored this peculiar display of a Beauxbatons Academy Quidditch Seeker accusing a black fox of lingerie theft. It was a rather habitual phenomenon.

The fox was not really a fox. Not merely.

At the moment, his eyes, the warm, welcoming, pure azure of a summer dusk descending, were distinctly sparkling. "_Charrrk_," he finally purred, whiskers trembling charitably, when the girl's cheeks, reflected in his lucid gaze, grew carnation pink. Then, as though the subject of a sped-up old film, his limbs and torso began extending, slimming, and losing ebony fur to sunbaked olive skin, and his head, though retaining the spiky black tufts previously gracing his body, sprouted streaks of a decidedly violent, bright purple. It complimented the tan of his long, animated, extremely handsome young face. Under the neon plum mop, he wiggled his black eyebrows, grinned—it made her feel as if she had just swallowed a pound of warm gingerbread—and disengaged the bikini straps from between now exceptionally straight, even teeth. Covering his lean torso was a pair of electric green swim trunks and, sodden and stuck to his skin, a navy blue t-shirt whose green print declared, "I make up all my own dance moves." He laughed—it was very loud and guttural and real, and thus, for better or worse, something akin to a horse whinny. "Oh, Fleur, I really am sorry. I didn't meant to upset you…here…" Then he handed back the undergarment, resisting any unkind urges to dangle it teasingly over her reddening face. "RAR!" he suddenly burst, flinging his arms around her and hugging her tightly. "I getchoo, my lady!" Another howling laugh at his own apparent humor followed this exclamation of affection. "Really and truly, sorry to embarrass you, chere!"

"Oh, let go," Fleur Delacour retorted, trying not to grin, and he obeyed her.

"Were you REALLY going to wear that monstrous thing at my papa's lakeshore social, Fleur?" He scratched a faint shadow of stubble on his chin mock-pensively.

"Well, I made do with compensatory articles of clothing in its SUDDEN MYSTERIOUS ABSENCE, did I not?" the girl huffed in return, gesturing at her current attire. "Silly, meddling animagus…."

"You are beautiful, Mademoiselle Delacour," 16-year-old Alexis Renard, the first registered animagus of the century since Minerva McGonagall, Hogwarts Professor, broke in graciously, and his tone was genuine. His eyes sparkled now in quite a different manner. His voice, an expressive tenor, dipped. "Have you missed me since I adopted the family way of the foreign exchange student?"

"The Academy is not the same without its best Quidditch Chaser, and its number one in class," Fleur crooned, raising a coquettish eyebrow. "How DO you tolerate that BOORISH Hogwarts, anyhow? I mean, Lexi, ENGLAND? OF ALL places…"

"Oh, Fleur, you are so judgmental! Hogwarts has Albus Dumbledore, and England has a very impressive Ministry of Magic." Renard took a seat on the log of his recent imprisonment, dangling gangly legs into the cool clean water. He smiled slightly at the minnows nipping at his toes as he spoke.  
"The Ministry? A bunch of bureaucratic fools, if you ask me." The part-veela gave a haughty scoff, joining him in a graceful Indian-style perch.

The boy's eyebrows cut a dark slash across his forehead, in, this time, true fierce thought. There was a sharpness of wit clear in his gaze now. "You may be right," he carefully replied. "But papa is a foreign emissary to the English Ministry, and they really rely on his wisdom in the field of transfiguration….my grandmamma Eloise would have his head, I think, if he ever turned his back on the family legacy—including raising me to become an extension of himself…"

"That's a bit stifling," Fleur spat bluntly, in her reedy tone, but again with some truth to her words. Then her voice softened. "And of course there is your mother, and St. Mungo's…how are you getting on with that Longbottom boy? Isn't he in the same predicament with BOTH his parents?"

Renard's spinal cord became stiff and straight as wood. "I don't know Neville Longbottom that well," he murmered. "He is a Gryffindor—remember we have four separate Houses there. I'm a Ravenclaw. Supposedly we're smarter than the other students, or some foolishness like that. And don't spread that story too far, I'm something like the only person he's told about his…mama and papa."

"What about all those bratty Purebloods that used to come up to Paris every summer? That boy with the hair that was whiter than mine, and the MOUTH…and my Lord, the name was _so _melodramatic….Dragon…Drake…."

"_Draco_ Malfoy was sorted into Slytherin. He's…tolerable in _small_ doses. It's no surprise, brought up by a couple of Purebloods with sticks up their asses, Fleur, I swear, those people and their megalomania, so I guess I'm slow to judge the kid…."

"Why, because he suffers from the affliction of being spoiled ROTTEN?" Fleur laughed airily, rolling her aquamarine eyes. "_Poooooor _little boy, poor little _richest _boy in England."

Renard's expression went flat, and a bit despairing, perhaps, at some incomprehension of hers which she still, which a breezy shrug, failed to recognize. The faintest of sarcasm tinged his tone. "Something like that…. never mind….Sometimes I think my best friend would eat him for breakfast if he had the chance, though."

"Oh? Your best friend?" A pout. "Your best friend besides _me_, right, Lexi?"

"Of course BESIDES you, Fleur." But he was just being kind. Alexis Renard prized purposeful, effortful kindness above all the accidental virtues, such as intellect or looks.

_Mama had taught him the blessing of kindness_.

"Well then what about Ravenclaw?" Fleur hissed an irritated sigh. "Any friends there?"

The boy's self-assured grin returned. "Of course. I am a great and vast pool of laughs, revels, and sociability, don't you know!" Another barked laugh, as he attempted to tickle her armpits. Fleur squealed and batted him away as he added, "My best friend, the one I just mentioned, he's in Ravenclaw. His name's Haylin Daire."

"IRISH?" Her nose wrinkled.

"FLEUUURRR…" A warning look. "There is nothing wrong with the Irish."

"Oh, alright, the Irish came up with potatoes and bagpipes and Guinness, so we love and tolerate them." Another scoff.

"No one invented potatoes, Fleur."

Haughty sigh! "You know what I mean, silly boy."

Renard's brooding look ebbed slightly. "That will have to do for now, I suppose. Anyway, yeah, he's great. He says we're as good as brothers."

"Oh? You're that close? Then he knows?"

"…About?"

"About …well…things….with your mama."

Again the unwelcome return to an unwelcome subject. Renard spoke tightly now, though with verity. "Of course he does. All of it. He doesn't care the way some people do. He loves her."

"It must be hard for you to try to gauge when someone can be trusted with that. It must be hard living with…"

"The mosquitoes are biting." The light in his eyes was now feral, acrid. "And drawing blood, Fleur. I have to go."

"…Oh, Lexi, I'm sorry, we don't have to…"

"No, it's….fine. See you later."

There was a small gust of air, and suddenly, once more, sitting next to the girl on the log was a black fox, its moonlight blue eyes somehow mournful as it darted off its seat and up the paved tiled pathway to the Baroque mansion on the French hillside.

The windows were very dark inside, except for one bedroom on the topmost floor.

**December, 6 months later**

"_I'm choking I'm choking  
On the smoke from this burning house  
I claw and I scrape  
But I can't seem to get out oh  
But who the who is this  
That's scratching from the ground  
It's my world too  
But who's gold is this I'm digging out  
When we go where we go  
When we're dead  
Is the verdict still out  
Do we get into line  
To line up with those long dead now  
With muffled tears of sorrow  
For bones underground  
This is our time yes it is  
Without or with this shadow of doubt_

_Don't want to wake up  
Lost in the dreams of our fathers  
It's such a waste child  
To live and die for the dreams of our fathers  
Though I must confess yes  
My dreams are a wonder about this  
This love I possess love  
Must be the dreams of our fathers"_

_--the Dave Matthews Band_

_Professor Marchbanks was halfway through testing Draco Malfoy._

_"Potter, is it?" said Professor Tofty, consulting his notes and peering over his pince-nez at Harry as he approached. "The famous Harry Potter?"_

_Out of the corner of his eye, Harry distinctly saw Malfoy throw a scathing look over at him; the wine glass Malfoy had been levitating fell to the floor and smashed._

_--From Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling_

Draco Malfoy was enjoying the crunching, defeated sound of the snow under his polished black boots. He clenched his dragon skin gloves and sneered demonically, stomping all the harder as cronies Crabbe and Goyle exchanged puzzled looks, then followed suit, with dull, primate-like cackles. Still Draco smirked, silently, cheeks gone ruddy with his efforts as he marched alongside the steady flow of fellow buttoned up and muffled Hogwarts third years.

_GRR!_ _CRUNCH, CRUNCH. Take that, snow, you insubordinate BASTARD! HA!_

Slytherin's prince possessed a positively unholy glee about visiting Hogsmeade without the restrictive presence of his parents. In fact, the lack of such incessant repression ("Getting sick? Nonsense, Draco! You will take this vintage Elderflower wine with our dinner guests like a grown man!" "Did I see you wobble on that broom dive, Draco? Practice makes _PRE_fect! Don't you _want _power in your fifth year!") was precisely his favorite thing about every school year. When he wasn't standing next to his father, there was a peculiar feverishly swelling phenomenon about his sense of competence and worth, and he really quite fancied it. He was so manic about it, in fact, that when his pride and arrogance continued proliferating—more like fungus now than a buoyant, cheerful red balloon—he had no desire whatsoever to stop his arrogant tyranny. _Power? Hell, yes, he wanted it. He wanted what he'd never had, that was human nature, damn it. And if it wasn't, and never would be, waiting at home…._

"Peegee back riiide!" came a squeak from behind Draco, and he found himself suddenly flung upon from behind. Two fuzzy lemon-yellow-mittened hands curled tightly around his neck and a small weight burdened his back. Amidst the scentless, icy cold late November air, the smell of gingerbread cookies filled his nose and long dark auburn hair tickled his ears. It was the only first year whose company he'd ever relished: Margaret Renard.

"Damn it," he grumbled, managing every bit of surliness he could, but still ultimately unable to suppress a grin. "Maggie, you silly….Hufflepuff."

"Bonjour, Draco!" Alexis Renard's painfully naïve and sweet little sister cooed, hugging his neck tighter for a second, cheek against his from behind. Instantly, she transformed Slytherin's cocky, malicious young god into a towheaded teddy bear. A handful of Gryffindors passed by; he vaguely caught wind of Seamus Finnegan hissing to Dean Thomas, "Hoy, that Hufflepuff's our secret weapon to taming Malfoy, let's figure a way to meld her permanently onto his back…" Parvati Patil, with them, let out a shrill giggle of delight as they marched on.

Draco blinked_. Huh? Power? What? Taming? …The hell? What was he thinking about power just now? He'd forgotten…._"Maggie," the child echoed with a thick French lilt, "Ah like zat. But Ah like Haylin's neeckname better. 'E calls me Mags."

"I'll make a note of that," the Malfoy legacy murmured, rolling his eyes.

A few other Slytherins now drifted past them, among them Crabbe, Goyle, a thick-necked sixth year named Ragan, Milicent Bulstrode and Draco's on-and-off girlfriend, Pansy Parkinson. Every one of them snickered. Professor Severus Snape, among the school escorts, looked through his greasy black hair across the barren terrain and rose two sharp disapproving eyebrows at this affectionate display. Of course this prompted Draco's peers to laugh all the harder and nastier.

Draco's head ducked down and he slunk on ahead of them, towards the Ravenclaws and presumably her big brother and his best friend, to deposit her there. Margaret then removed his fur cap and stuck it on top of her head; far too large for her, it promptly sank down to the level of her eyes. She giggled. "Your head smells like flowers," she squealed.

Draco's cheeks reddened again, almost imperceptibly. "Well, it's customary to wash one's bloody HAIR, Margaret." He kept hiking, passenger in tow, towards the sixth years in the front of the Ravenclaw mob.

"Maggie. Ah-Ah DO li-like Maggie, Ah di-didn't mean for you to st-stop." Her voice was almost unbearably cute, even to his withdrawn and cautious heart, because every time he took a step she bounced on his back and her words hiccupped.

"Right, well. Maggie, then. I say, my ears are getting a bit cold down here." He grinned again and ran a few paces making her bounce all the more and she giggled and hiccupped and went "_wheee-ee-ee-ee_" and he too dared to laugh while all the other Slytherins curled their nostrils in contempt of their ringleader's uncharacteristically wholesome behavior.

When he slowed down she caught her breath and replied matter-of-factly, "MY ears are fine!"

He scoffed, but before he could utter another protest, she placed her wool mittens over his ears. "Voila, t'en fais pas!"

Draco chuckled again, more softly. "Whatever. Hey. Maggie. Stick out your tongue." It had begun to snow.

The ten-year-old obeyed and squealed again. "Tastes like cotton candy!"

"You're joshing," he snorted, but his tongue found itself shooting out for verification. Yes, she had been joshing. "Goose," he grumbled, but then he laughed again.

The larger brood of Gryffindors passed by, cutting suddenly, unintentionally, in front of the Ravenclaws—as well as Draco and Margaret. Among them was Hermione Granger, flanking an uncharacteristically Potter-less Ron Weasley. _Weasel Kiiing. Dumb tall carrot topped mother-f…Oh great, what does SHE want? _Granger sported a salmon-colored sweater, her bushy, wavy brown hair flying about in the chilly drafts. She turned directly towards them, ready to dare the vindictive Pureblood to attack her with his bigotry. But then she guarded her steps towards him, catching the innocently smiling Margaret clinging to his back. Renard's sister waved at this stranger and called a hello. Hermione smiled tightly at her, sighed, clicked her tongue, and melted back into the crowd of disappearing Gryffindors.

Draco had gone very tense, crouching forward, his face taut and pale with disgust and rage.

_Father, someone called me a nasty name today._

_Oh, is that so? Draco, what you must do is make that person feel precisely how you feel right now, in your moment of ridicule. Call them something right back. Belittle them. Make them feel it, too, son. Humiliate them—make them empathize exquisitely. Be stronger. Does that make sense, Draco? Be STRONGER._

_Yes, father. Of course. _

_For instance. Was this person a Muggle-born?_

_Yes, father. I think. _

_What do we do when we see a Muggle-born, Draco?_

_We call them Mudblood, father._

_Very good, son. _

_….Are you proud of me, father?_

_…What a peculiar question, Draco. Of course I am…if you do as I say. _

_Only then? Would you be prouder if Harry Potter weren't always—_

_Just do as I say, Draco. _

"That's right, Mudblood, off with you and your dirt," Draco growled at Hermione's vanishing back. Fervently. His eyes blazed with an overzealous, wickedly pious light. Yes, wickedly pious. This was his _duty_. His family's calling. To end the primeval superstition and dilution of wizardry as if it were some evil, ominous disease, to stop the nonsense by snuffing out its source. Muggles were all evil.

They had to be. It was _so important_ to his dad. So they HAD to be worthless filth, or something subtle yet profound about the world's foundation would collapse beneath him…. It would be like…once, when he was six or seven, he had seen his father catch a simple case of Dragonpox. Hardly fatal, and the worst part of it was a trip or two to their fine platinum leafed porcelain toilet and an outbreak of weeping green rashes. The spots were light sensitive, so Narcissa had sanctioned her husband off in their sprawling master bedroom with two layers of curtains blocking all light. Lucius had missed maybe three days of work at the very worst of it, flat on his back, and then up on the fourth day and dressing and ready to disapparate off to his office.

But Draco had rarely ever been so anxious as in those three days of his father's incapacitation. In part, it was because his grandfather Abraxus Malfoy had died of Dragon Pox; he had been so old and frail already.

But there was another reason. Father did not get sick, or cough, or vomit, or have diarrhea or any of those other undignified, weak, HUMAN things, did he? If Father were susceptible to these things, how could earth pivot on its access?

Lucius Malfoy was a fine marble pillar, a firm steel testimony to everything Draco ever wanted to become. He was a god and guardian. It did not matter, or so Draco fiercely persuaded himself, that Father did not always have time to hug his boy or tuck him in or listen to every childish story Draco had to share over breakfast, in his stupid squeaky little voice….

It did not matter, or so Draco _very _fiercely persuaded himself, that Father often let his temper override his cool self-control, that at times Draco had been told to bend over in Father's pine, musk, and dragon oil scented study, and that the rock-hard snake cane had not merely served as a storage space for Lucius's wand. When Draco was a little boy, Father was reassurance and stability embodied. The welcoming _and _the sinister. _Period_. To see him hunched over a wastebasket, sweaty and exhausted and panting for breath, for even _three days_…. Draco remembered walking up to his father in the dark bedroom, directed by his mother, his knees freshly scabbed from a rough play Quidditch match with Gregory Goyle and his cousins, sweaty and pink-cheeked from thesun. He had knelt by Lucius while the elder Malfoy panted over the wastebasket at the edge of the silk-sheeted bed, and had watched him retch, and had felt an odd lump in his throat and a tightness in his chest. Then, for some damn reason, he had blurted in that same retarded squeaky (puberty took its _good old time_ with Draco) little boy voice, "Father, I won't _ever_ disappoint you."

Lucius's glittering gray eyes had opened up for a second. He had had offered his child an unreadable expression through his long curtain of white-blond hair, then had planted a big, elegant hand on his chest, and pushed him a bit forcefully away. Staring down into the wastebasket with that same enigmatic stoicism on his face, Father then hoarsely snarled that Draco should stay back, that he would catch the Pox too and it would make Mum _very _upset if he did, and for God's Sake, son, to go get a damned shower because "you smell like a house elf's unmentionables."

It had been enough for Draco; it had displayed Lucius's usual authority and decisiveness, and it meant that the earth was pivoting again. He had rushed off to the bathroom and turned on the shower faucet and stripped down naked, lathering up straight away. Goyle and the other kids had gone home without saying goodbye, it had taken Draco so long, making sure he took the most thorough shower of his life. For Father, who left the next morning before he got up, without saying goodbye, for his Ministry office.

_Don't mouth off at me, stupid boy. You and your Harry Potter obsession. He is just a half-blood. A useless Gryffindor. Beneath our concern. _

_I'm sorry, father. It's just that when he upstages me, you—_

_You should be sorry. Stop simpering at ME about it, DO something about it. You should be sorry for being second best. To Potter, to that Granger Mudblood, to all that outdo you. For my sake, son. You know how it pains me, Draco. _

_Of course, father._

_You are forgiven this time. _

_Thank you, father._

_Now. What do we do if they resist being called Mudblood?_

_We spit in their face._

_How often?_

_As many times as they resist. _

_Correct. Very,very good, my son. My dear boy. _

_Thank you very much, father._

"Draco!" Margaret snapped, "when Ah am on your back, you canno' be MEAN to people!"

He grunted, coming out of his reverie. "You're always on m'back, y'little rotter."

"What did you say?"

"Nothing. Look, I'm a dragon. _Haaaahhhh_." He opened his mouth wide and vapor billowed out into the freezing air.

Margaret giggled loudly and joined him at once in a "haaahing" party, and they both were all but howling with laughter when at last they spotted Renard and Haylin, both regarding them with a mix of incredulity and amusement. They made their way to the Three Broomsticks and to as many bottles of hot butter beer that they could consume.

Draco stared distractedly out the leaden glass windows, sipping his third bottle with a content full feeling in his gut. He let out a soft hiccup and watched his friends reflected in the glass panes against the swirls of snow outdoors. Purple-headed Alexis Renard and Haylin Daire—a tall, lanky sixth year with scars crisscrossing his milky cheeks and intense emerald eyes partially hidden by red-blond curls—started a belching contest, periodically pausing to play wrestle each other on their bar stools, while little Margaret giggled and scolded them. Crabbe and Goyle had made their way over uncertainly, murmering in Draco's ear that Pansy was working herself into a state over Draco's absence from "their table" in the front of the tavern. _Freaking harpy. _Draco growled and waved them off, and heard himself say something about "being there in a minute."

Seamus Finnegan had come over to gab with fellow Irishman Haylin, and Haylin's girlfriend Susan Collins trailed after him (and when Pansy jeered at them on their way over, Susan calmly observed, "Parkinson, it's quite fitting that Muggles have a vicious disease named after _you_," and _wow,_ was it ever hard for Draco to keep a straight face at _that_. Susan bumped hips coyly with Haylin, her boyfriend, and kissed a wind burned cheek, which flushed a shade of beet—and made the whole table burst into riotous laughter. Draco edged involuntarily closer to the window and farther from the loud, warm crowd, with another hiccup. Short, curvy, and blond, with a somehow nurturing, maternal air despite her youth, Susan was also a Gryffindor, also a close new friend of Draco's….and a Muggle-born.

_Father? _

And there was a running promise between them: One day she'd buy him a New York Yankees baseball cap, even though she too was British, just so he could brag about having his own genuine piece of Muggle clothing. "You know you'll wear it, because you can say you scalped a Muggle," she always teased. She was like a big sister, the way she gave little one-arm squeezes and the way she smelled clean and sweet, like soap and milk and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. "Of course, you've stopped using the M word around me, haven't you?"

Oh, God, and he LOVED her father, Jim's, dog. It was a big slobbery Labrador named Charlie. It always chose HIM when Susan took them all to her parents'. Always bounded gleefully up to HIM FIRST, licked HIS hand first, wagged its tail at HIM the most. He loved that damned dog SO much. A Mudblood's dog.

_Yes, Draco?_

_What if one were to come across a Mudblood that seemed…decent?_

_…Never, EVER ask me that question again, Draco. NEVER. Remember Mr. Rotticks at the Ministry. Arthur Weasley's old friend. Sever ties with whatever filth to which you've been exposed at once. Do you understand me?_

_Yes, father._

Two months ago, a conversation with Lucius via the Floo Network in the Slytherin common room. And still he hadn't….

"Draco?" A familiar, warm female voice. Someone touched his hunched shoulder.

"Filth" was touching his shoulder. He was letting it.

"_WHAT_?" White blond locks flung in all directions as Lucius Malfoy's son lashed around, a cornered and weak wild animal, in his bar stool. Yet another hiccup escaped his pouting lips and a thin hand flung across his mouth, his eyes gawking with the fear that somehow the girl smiling at him in sisterly concern were adept at legilimency. The glinting silver and emerald Malfoy signet on his ring finger nearly blinded her kind round seafoam blue eyes. She cringed as though he had been prepared to hit her, pupils contracting painfully at the bright light. "…Sorry, Susan," he mumbled, lowering his hand. She just _SMILED back_. _OH GOD, MERLIN, make her STOP. _

"You okay, hon?" She ruffled his sleek towhead lightly. "You're not usually one for long brooding silences."

"Filth" was touching his hair. He was letting it. He _didn't bloody care_. Not here. Not right now, when he felt like he was _home_, for just one exquisite millisecond.

The question stung. _Oh, sure, peachy._ _Just ruminating on how my father would slit your throat with a hex if he had five minutes alone with you. And here you are worried about ME. _But there was one thing Draco was good at: Lying.

"I'm doing great. I'm _ME_, after all, haha….ha."

July, two Summers before the Goblet of Fire "Playground school bell rings again 

_Rain clouds come to play again_

_Has no one told you she's not breathing?_

Hello 

_I'm your mind_

_Giving you someone to talk to_

_Hello_

_If I smile and don't believe_

_Somehow I know I'll wake from this dream_

_Don't try to fix me_

_I'm not broken_

_Hello_

_I'm the lie living for you so you can hide_

_Don't cry_

_Suddenly I know I'm not sleeping_

_Hello_

_I'm still here_

_All that's left of yesterday"_

_--Evanescence_

Victor Renard, internationally renowned Transfiguration scholar, wasn't due home from his foreign correspondence with the Ministry of Magic for two hours, and his oldest child and longest-standing research project, record-young emerging Animagus Alexis Renard, heard a thump in the top stairs west wing. This was where his mother Odile Renard slept.

Alexis made his way past the sprawling ballroom fireplace and up a series of seemingly unending spiral stairs from the master kitchen, where he had gone for a midnight snack (with the vast quantities of dessert cheese that the skinny Alexis consumed, it was rather a freak miracle that he was not wider than he was tall). He passed marble and oak walls flickering with the light of bronze and blue candelabras, the walls engraved with the names and birth and death dates of family members, whose portraits smiled contentedly at him as he waved and grinned. He was chatting genially with a long dead maternal great grandmother's portrait near the top floor when the sound of pattering socked feet drew his attention to the dark, anesthetic-scented hallway ahead.

An apparition under a large pink chenille blanket came barreling towards him, softly squealing and wringing its tiny fists. "Lexiiiiiii," it whimpered. Were he not aware that his sister, the diminutive, nine year old Margaret Renard, was hidden under it, he might have been alarmed. "Boodle?" he half-chuckled her family nickname.

The pink mass stopped and a small, round face with upturned nose and chocolate brown eyes peeked out from under it. Margaret blinked behind tumbles of thick dark red curls and square-framed glasses. "Mama is having a hard time again," she spoke in a gentle, scared squeak. "She's been afraid there were dark wizards after us ever since the lakeside party…"

Renard steeled himself, kneeling and sticking his head under the blanket with his sister. He smiled at her softly inside their little makeshift tent in the hallway. Papa never did this stuff anymore: It was HIS job now. He was proud of the responsibility, really… "Chere, that is usually the case. Mama has what the Muggles call schizophrenia, and it's chronic, so sometimes the confusion and stuff sticks for longer periods…"

"NO," the child squealed indignantly, with a sad sigh. "I mean she's REALLY upset right NOW. She keeps hiding in the corner and throwing things across the floor, and there's nothing THERE." Her cherub lips quivered; her effort at bravery was plain, especially since her round brown eyes were glimmering with tears.

Renard nodded, slowly, and squeezed her shoulders. Then he exchanged a quick Eskimo kiss with his little sister. "I'll fix it, Boodle. I promise, okay? Go to bed."

"You can't do everything to make everyone happy, Lexi," the child mumbled, going pigeon-toed.

"I can try," he retorted more firmly, tugging her into her cotton-candy scented bedroom by the strings of her counting sheep print pajamas. "Bed. Now. Or I getchoo!" Comically, he flung the blanket off them both and attacked her stomach with his fingers, tickling until he drew out a satisfactory string of giggles. "That's better. I'll be back later to read some _Tales of Merlin_ with you if you like."

She nodded eagerly, her long auburn eyelashes blinking as she leapt into bed and clutched the sheets to her face. Then she made another hiding place under the covers, and Renard smiled tenderly at the lump in the bed before dimming her light and closing her door.

He proceeded down the hall with quite a tenser look on his face, till he reached the farthest west room. The smell of anesthetic potions was now overpowering; it made his eyes itch and water.

Mama was at the end of the hall. She was in the padded bedroom next to the master bedroom where she and Victor once slept together in the most enviable of marital bliss.

Papa had been faithful to her ever since her descent into madness…he had never put anything before her, not his career, not his reputation, certainly never another woman…but this very devotion had spent all his will to feel. The fact that he was very much alive and healthy and yet there was a portrait of him on the door of the bedroom which smiled in its tight, controlled way at his children while he was tending to their mother or off on business, as if he never expected to be present HIMSELF, ever again… and the fact that he had asked one of their house elves to hide his wedding album from him indefinitely after the day Odile Renard had been first locked up at St. Mungo's….both those things were fairly telling. His heart was cautiously asleep, and his children, completely contrary to his intentions, paid dearly. They missed him as much as they missed their mother. But Alexis Renard was afraid to tell his father these things, so he let Victor simply nod a goodbye at him over breakfast every morning as he departed for work. He never told him how much one hug a week, or even a smile, or a handshake, for God's sake, might have helped him feel less desperately abandoned. He didn't want to admit that he couldn't be as self-sufficient as Victor was. He didn't want to think that secretly he was vulnerable, fallible, exquisitely breaking. Not ever.

So when Victor ordered the habitual straightening the surrogate portrait on the empty bedroom door, as Alexis did right now, passing it to see to his distraught mother, his son never admitted how he REALLY wanted to rip that portrait off its damn gold-leaf frame. He just obeyed.

But when Victor told him to shave off his five o'clock shadow, because it looked "uncivilized" despite the way all the pretty young Parisian debutantes fawned over it, Alexis let his stubble grow a little longer and darker. He had to PRETEND he could be straight and firm with papa.

Presently the oldest Renard child stepped inside an all-white padded room with two small circular windows; on mailing crate after mailing crate, freshly pried open, sat vases of exotic flowers and bottles of herbs, all of which were ingredients for Mediwizard Healers' potions.

In a far corner, behind a particularly large crate, apparently interrupted in the middle of flinging tomato plant bulbs across the room at the door, sat a woman in her early 40's: A woman who immediately struck the viewer of a great beauty transparently veiled in dishevelment and illness. Her face was round and befreckled like the child Margaret's, though the rest of her was quite thin under her many layers of stained green and white robes. But her eyes were her son's: that same breathtaking blue that exuded the warmth of sunlight on a lake, of a welcome home, framed by the slightest of laugh creases. What was tragic was the way they were now widened at horror and revulsion at the sight of the boy standing before her. She clutched at her robe fronts, her wand hand, long deprived of the tool that could do herself or others imminent harm, convulsing violently. "Who sent you?" she demanded, in a deep throaty whisper.

"Mama, it's just me. It's just Alexis. I sent myself. " Renard waited for his mother to recollect herself. In his experience, this took a range between twenty seconds and several hours. He sat Indian-style on the white area rug on the polished wooden floor and began to hum, very softly, a string of rather sappy Muggle songs he had heard in his secondhand experience of his papa's respectful fascination with the non-wizarding culture of the Continent and the States of the 1980's. He tilted his head from one side to the other, smiling in apparent serenity, and danced just slightly in his sitting spot. When he was in the middle of a number entitled something like "You Take My Breath Away," some clarity seemed to enter his mama's eyes. Odile Renard crept out from behind the wooden mailing crate—Alexis knew his papa had bought every one of these medicinal herbs for her to experiment with, even though she was forever debilitated from applying her efforts to a Healing career that had once brought her international renown. She smiled tentatively at her son. He grinned back and winked at her as she sat down next to him, mimicking his posture.

"Wood sorrel, ma chere," she breathed, the crazed look in her eyes now almost completely ebbing, as she shoved some unfamiliar flowers into her son's long, thin olive fingers.

Those fingers trembled in return as she spoke. "Wood sorrel and witch hazel. Healers use flowers and herbs for potions all the time, you know. I made a potion last week at St. Mungo's with these items for someone who'd endured a rather nasty encounter with a bat bogey hex, and I looked up their meaning in the Runes texts, and wood sorrel means a mother's joy, a parent's joy really, and a parent's devotion. Can you imagine that? And witch hazel, well the Muggles call it that because it's the only thing they realize has magical properties. Imagine that, poor sweet dears…"

She barked a laugh, her loud, warm laugh like a happily bubbling stew or a deep, throaty birdcall, the only completely intact remnant of her mentally sound self of the past.

"Mama," Renard retorted steadily, but gently, "you haven't been to work at St. Mungo's in ten years."

Odile blinked. "Silly boy," was all she said to this, but her voice was now hoarse. "They haven't been around to try and curse you into that little black creature lately, have they? You know—the Dark Wizards? The Walpurgis lot?" She leaned in very close then, and clung to him as slowly he plucked petals from the flowers. _She'll get well, she won't, she'll get well, she won't…Will. MUST. I love her. I love her so much….She is worth a thousand bouquets of wood sorrel…._

"No, Mama, there are no Death Eaters at Renard Estate." Again the sensible but tender tone. _She always thinks I've been cursed when I transform into a fox. She's forgotten I'm an Animagus. Her father, Grandpapa Andre, was an Auror…I'll bet he was just as paranoid…._

"Did you know," Odile whispered, with a tremulous little laugh, suddenly changing subjects, "that when he turned 18, your Papa was _dreadful_ at Apparating?"

Renard held his mother's head in his arms. He stroked her hair, short-cropped and terribly unkempt, with only hints of a deep smoldering auburn sheen from her youth—the same auburn as Margaret's hair. "I cannot imagine Papa being dreadful at anything." _Except at reminding us that behind that coldness is still a vulnerable kind of love, a love he used to show me…not the brisk Pragmatist he is now, in order to survive this sorrow, and to keep the rest of us intact….oh, Mama…When did Papa last smile? Was it barely after Margaret was born?_

"He always Apparated into a body of water close to his target. Once, when we were at Hogwarts, you know, exchange students from Beauxbatons, just like you, he Apparated into the Ravenclaw girls' showers in an attempt to meet me in the Commonroom. My, that caused a stir. Did you know he was a Slytherin? So all the girls but me decided he was a bad egg….some of them liked this, of course, like that Narcissa Black girl….who did she marry again?…..Oh, Lucius Malfoy, I remember he fancied me once, how ironic….But Victor has little dimple-ish things over his nose when he smiles, and his eyes just melt when we go barefoot at the lakeside together, so I know they are wrong…. He loves you. He does. He is just afraid."

With this final sentence, Odile was suddenly so fervent that all Renard could do was nod in response. "Right, mama," he mumbled. "But so am I."

"It always passes. It will pass again, and we will all go on picnics and dance to Muggle music as we used to," Odile crooned, and he knew she meant her mental illness, and it pained him to think she had to pretend to be alright for his well being.

But he was grateful too. And instantly reassured. And that was the bittersweet part of it.

**Early June, one summer before the Goblet of Fire**

_How's life, Malfoy? Not too swanky for your toleration, I hope…Ha, just joking, kiddo. Be kind to Joan, she's an ancient screech owl…yeah, get it, Joan of Arc, French saint? Listen, what do I always say? Humor gets us through the unendurable, and the French endure the most! I mean, look at me, I used to survive Madame Maxime yearly! Well, at least we have great cheese. Brie, buddy. Brie! Anyway….I am sure you'd rather I flooed you a message in your father's gargantuan fireplace, aside the fact that your father hates my whole family for supporting the Muggle Protection Act. So I bet you probably don't want my face flaming right in front of his beady little gray eyes. You know, I should shut up about him now, in case Joan settles for ANY towhead and lands on his shoulder instead of yours. Bet you're worried about the O.W.L.S already, this early in the game. They're a breeze, just study really thoroughly, okay? Just start now, fifth year's sooner than you think. Hey, studying's not all that bad…I kind of like it. Oh well!….God, kid, we miss you here. Yeah, don't get all weepy on me, ya little vial of vitriol. Haylin and I, we miss the face to face talk. And your swaggering remarks. And your jaw-droppingly unexpected little kindnesses to Haylin's girlfriend Susan—admit, it, you have a soft spot for ONE Muggle, you've even nicknamed her Shortie, haven't you! SHE TOLD ME! Oh man, you're turning pale…or maybe you're blushing! —and the way you get all protective of my little sister Margaret (yeah, you call her Maggie, I know). I will just say it, man: It's really sweet. She misses her blond broom flying instructor slash piggyback ride giver. _

_You know, Malfoy… half the school thinks you're an unredeemable prick. My old girlfriend even said she thought so last summer….It's too bad you never let anyone get to know you for real. It's too bad you react to that nice Potter boy and his friends so explosively…. WITHDRAWN!…. Did you hear Haylin moved into a new flat in London after he and his papa had their little…ah….falling out over his um….moon oriented condition? He probably told you all this already, since he says you've been inundating him in posts all summer. He loves it, don't worry—he calls you "Piss-ant" these days instead of "Runt," I'm sure you're glad for that. Or…not. Perhaps he should research that! What do Crabbe and Goyle call you? "Lord Draco?" WITHDRAWN AGAIN, little bro! Nothing but love!_

_Anyway, the Muggles are a riot, man, with those "teevee" boxes they stare at all day and those things they talk into that look like plastic bananas, and oh, ha, those big metal things they buzz around in, but they have cool things like these carousel straw containers and the straws come out in this big fan, and really weird cool singers like "Enya" and "the Beetles"…or maybe it's "Beatles," that would make more sense, as I'd not want to buy an album with a bunch of insects as the singers ….and DON'T start calling the RESPECTABLE denizens of the nonmagical world that filthy M word, at least not around me, as I really want to keep liking you. _

_Thanks. _

_Oh you little bitch. You just thought it in your head to spite me, didn't you? Goofball! Man! ZUT ALORS and stuff! OH HEY! I had a weird dream last night. It kind of freaks me out, kiddo. SO don't read it after you have your ickle milkses and cookieses and go to bed… Just KIDDING AGAIN! YAY! WINTHDRAWN NUMBAH THREE!_

_Well it was pretty damned creepy. We were all there, you, me, Haylin, Susan, Margaret…there was this red sky like a volcano…it was the night of the Quidditch World Cup…yeah, I know, it hasn't happened yet, that's our final stop this summer…but work with me, here…anyway, there was this huge gnarled tree in the middle of a field, and behind it was a really dark forest, and you and Margaret and Susan were all running towards the tree. Then you reached out and touched it, and disappeared, Lil' Bro. And the girls screamed and ran back into the clearing…then Haylin was fighting some men in a white mask and black robes—the tree had turned into those men—and I was trying to help him, but I heard the girls screaming…they were sinking into a lake. I struck out to save them but they were both going under and I couldn't get to them both. Then Haylin came back out into the clearing and he was covered in blood, so I tried to go back to shore and help him but he swam out to me and grabbed me. And thank God I woke up before we sank totally under the surface….man, some dreams just shouldn't be completed, you know? _

_Sorry, I probably shouldn't have told you that. It's just a lot to handle alone sometimes. I think I heard mama crying when I was sinking too. THAT was the freaky part._

_Anyway, kiddo, see you in a couple weeks, if you can escape that family of yours…_

_--A.R._

**November, 7 Months Earlier**

_"My black backpack's stuffed with broken dreams  
20 bucks should get me through the week  
Never said a word of discontentment  
Fought it a thousand times but now  
I'm leaving home _

Here in the shadows  
I'm safe  
I'm free  
I've nowhere else to go but  
I cannot stay where I don't belong

_Two months pass by and it's getting cold  
I know I'm not lost  
I'm just alone  
But I won't cry  
I won't give up  
I can't go back now  
Waking up is knowing who you really are _

Show me the shadow where true meaning lies  
So much more dismay in empty eyes"

_--Evanescence_

Alexis Renard pulled off his stifling charcoal gray sweater and laced his blue and bronze necktie about his head, out of sheer boredom. He blew air out onto the tail of it and watched it flobbering in front of his nose, then scratched his stomach, his undershirt blazoned with a circular dotted symbol and orange letters reading, "Hold me, I'm a fermata." Sitting in the hospital wing of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry receiving a vaporous inhaling potion for a head cold was not the most entertaining experience of his life—at least, not until two unlikely individuals joined him: Moaning Myrtle, the young female ghost who haunted the girls' lavatory and made misery into a delicate art form, and a dirt encased, bruised and Quidditch-clad Draco Malfoy.

Myrtle hovered over the bed into which the white-blond haired Seeker was being hauled by troll-faced Slytherin teammates Montague and Flint; his right leg was twisted entirely against the joint, and backwards, the bones apparently in hopeless fragments, and his face was tight with pain and nausea. His eyes were red-rimmed and the occasional whimper escaped him. "Oh, hush, Master Malfoy, I'm fixing a bone-growing potion for you right now," a prim lady in a nurse's apron squawked from her nearby office.

Myrtle, for her part, peered and blinked impatiently at the handsome purple-haired French exchange student through her miniscule spectacles. "Hello, Alexis." A stale variant of flirtation. And then, with marked favor, which, considering Renard's status as the acme of Upperclassman Gentleman Hearththrobs at Hogwarts, was rather odd: "Hello, Draco. Poor poor ickle Draco."

The Quidditch Match's klaxons of cheering and booing were audible all the way across the school grounds as both boys stared, first at each other, then at the simpering specter.

Renard caught a trace of a smirk on Draco's face, which was sodden with sweat, tinged in gray, and speckled with blood from a shattered nose, before replying, "Good afternoon, chere Myrtle." His face spread into a dazzling smile. He spoke kindly, his blue eyes gleaming. "The u-bends aren't the same when you're not around. Makes urinals inferior things since you never come visit us boys. Shame on you, Myrtle. Tsk!"

The ghost let out an indignant little wail. "But I DO come visit the boys' lavatory, don't I, Draco? Don't you ever tell anyone about our talks? We're kindred spirits, you see, Alexis."

"Oh?" Renard's dark eyebrows shot up on his forehead as he watched Slytherin's Seeker redden. "Are you now?" The laughter he restrained made his tone shake. "That is wonderful."

Myrtle beamed at his affirmation and praise.

Draco's spectral gray eyes, an excellent match to the glowing hue of Myrtle's transparent robes, rolled up in his head; he feigned faintness until the zealous head nurse, Madam Pomfrey, banished his sneering teammates from the infirmary. Then, as the bone healing potion was shoved into his long pale fingers, he gazed around shiftily, and finally snorted. "Myrtle, come off it." He took several foul gulps, gagging.

Myrtle yelped. "But I…"

"You keep quiet about it, you hear me? Outside the lavatory, I don't know you," the boy snapped, taking a more cautious sip, and still grimacing. He wiped his wet hair, plastered like a platinum veil over his fair face, out of his eyes.

She pouted, whined, and reeled about above the beds. "You're so cruel."

Renard bit his lip; he couldn't help having the amusing impression of an old married couple arguing over who got the larger plate of brown sugar-baked yam at dinner.

Draco sniffed, tossing his wet hair off to one side, and it made a smacking sound against his other cheek. The result of this cavalier gesture was further proof that he was barely thirteen years old. "Owch. Maybe I HAVE to be cruel. So what?" He eased down on the pillows of the hospital bed.

"So I hate you!" With this equally childish retort, Myrtle let out a mournful howl and soared through the opposite wall of the hospital.

Renard blinked and cast a peripheral look at Malfoy. He blinked again: The boy looked terribly shamefaced. "So do you always treat your well wishers and friends like that?" He softened the critique with another smile.

"Not all of them." Draco spoke softly, giving him a meaningful look. "Not your sister." He hissed a sigh.

Renard nodded more soberly. "I know. What happened? Fell off your broom chasing the Snitch?"

"POTTER happened, that's what!" The cool despair on the third year's face became broiling rage in an instant. Then, in a quieter mumble, "Yeah, we were BOTH after the Snitch and I almost had it and I turned around to gloat at him, and uh….there was a loose beam in the stands and my leg caught…"

"Owch, kiddo." Renard winced in sympathy. Loudly, he sniffled back a barrage of rhinovirus-snot and inhaled more medicinal vapor out of Madam Pomfrey's flask.

Apparently Draco took this as deeply felt sentiment on behalf of his plight. He cast a scornful glance around the room as though smug that a "cool" sixth year gave such a great shit about his well being. "Yeah," he said, drawing upright, apparently comforted. "Yeah, thanks, it hurts like hell. It DOES." His crushed nose gushed another small red rivulet and he whined at Madam Pomfrey to hurry with her clotting potion, clutching his face. "My father and mother are coming any moment now to check on me. They were watching the match. When I…fell."

"I'm sure they'll be here soon," Renard nodded, over the head nurse's further clucking. "How DO you feel?"

"I feel like I've been gnashed from the inside out by a dozen trip jinxes," the boy gritted, his bitter voice muffled by the hands clutching his bloody nose and burst lip.

"Well…life could be better, then, eh!" Renard howled a brief commiserating laugh that was quickly snuffed by a silent, seething pewter glare. "Aw come on, kiddo…with your parents' clout, once they get here, it'll be like you're the rajah of 'Ogwarts the way Madam Pomfrey will treat you." He chuckled again, good-naturedly. From her office, the head nurse cast him a look that conveyed, "What do you think I've been doing ALREADY?"

A brief silence followed.

"Do you know what my name means, Renard?" Malfoy murmured, eyes bored, half-hooded with cynicism. He flopped over on his side on the hospital bed, looking very much like the spoiled little Eastern prince Renard had jokingly described with so many hospital pillows propping him and the delicate bed curtains billowing around his lazy little frame.

"Er…" Well. _This_ was decidedly off topic.

"Mighty serpent or dragon, for the given name," snorted Draco, rolling those jaded eyes, "and here's the kicker: Malfoy means bad faith. My surname means _bad faith_. I'm a ruddy _mighty serpent of bad faith_. _Oooooo._ Scary shite. Blimey, what…absolute _rubbish_." He sighed, his ears glowing a rather pretty shade of pink, debunking the apparent breezy disdain in his expression.

"Well, ah…" Renard cleared his throat, scouring for a response that might invoke levity…none came. Lamely, he supplied, "mine, uh, means….fox. And Alexis…er there was once a Muggle prince in Russia named Alexis….my uh name means 'Helper' …"

Draco slanted another acid look his way. "_Do_ tell," he drawled. "Bloody hell, I just…_loooove_ having the longest most extensive damned lineage at Hogwarts. Being a legacy is _SOOOO _fun. I can't _WAIIIIT _to be reminded of the _disgrace _I am to that legacy once father arrives. Maybe he'll let me go to Hogsmeade still if I'm _really _sugar-assed to them both."

"Er…"

"Save it, Renard."

"Um…okay, then." The French student could not help a small laugh. "You never shut up, do you?"

"Oh, like YOU'RE a fount of tranquility…. WOT? Stoppit, it's NOT funny."

Renard wiped his eyes, still giving way to stray chuckles following the outburst of laugher Draco had caused. "Hooo boy. Yes it is."

"….Okay fine, it's _sorta _funny." Now the injured Slytherin Seeker gave a small, uncharacteristically clumsy laugh, which sounded like a string of dull but charming "huhuhuh" 's. "Are you ever gonna take that tie off your head, mate?"

"OH!" Renard hooted and reached upward. "You wound me! I thought it was stylish!"

"You would, wouldn't you, Mr. Renard?" A new voice, drawling with artificial pleasantry, slid between them. Both heads turned to behold an imposing figure swathed in deep blood red embroidered vestcoat and cloaked in black and silver. The man's pale, clean chin tilted back as he appraised the boy in the bed next to Draco, and under his transparent gray glare, Renard felt his hand instantly retrieving the tie from his purple mop of hair.

"Laughter breeds contentment, monsieur," the Animagus spoke up firmly, though his throat strained. "And contentment breeds a satisfied life." He stood and bowed at the waist, stiffly, impeccably, as his father Victor had taught him, to his addressor. The cold medicine made him sway a bit woozily before he sat back down.

"Ah. What a quaint little philosophy." Lucius Malfoy sneered at the French student, almost as though indulging a favored but mentally handicapped nephew. The only tempering quality about the aristocrat's appearance was the presence of his wife Narcissa Black Malfoy, clinging to his arm. She wore a flowing taffeta gown of iridescent blue and her face, though of an even greater pallor than that of her husband's or son's, was as exquisite as porcelain. As she regarded Draco, a small crease formed between her eyebrows. Her body leaned towards him but at the same time, her fingers dug even deeper into her husband's left forearm.

"Not so hard, Cissa," Lucius purred, lip curling irritably as he led her to the foot of Draco's bed.

Draco, for his part, suddenly appeared as though he might throw up at the slightest provocation. He mumbled a greeting, bit his lip, and tried to stand and bow to his father as well—Renard was astonished, for the boy had so recently expressed his misery. Indeed, Draco's skinny knees buckled instantly. He yelped in a most undignified manner as Narcissa dashed forward and caught him. "Now, now, my pet, please relax," she crooned.

Draco's cheeks warmed.

"STAY, foolish boy," Lucius snapped unnecessarily, and the veins in Draco's alabaster cheeks now exploded with fire. "Good lord, settle DOWN. And YOU start doing your job." He tugged fiercely on the train of his black traveling cloak, yanking it out of the hands of a cowering, orb-eyed house elf who had been trailing his every move. He sucked air into pursed cheeks, inspecting the handful of brown spatters on the garment. "Really, look at the mud on my clothes. This is inexcusable."

Narcissa's dress train was twice as filthy and she had been provided with no elf's assistance; nevertheless her nose curled at the bat eared scapegoat as though she smelled something rancid. "Indeed," she hissed.

Before the tiny creature could so much as simper an apology, Lucius's jeweled gaze drifted away and appraised the carved silver head of his cane—the form of a striking serpent.

"My leg's going to be fine, father," Draco issued nervously into the silence, nodding bracingly, as though this had ever been a burning question. His mother, whom both Malfoy men ignored, sighed with relief and gently stroked his sleek blond head. He jerked away from her touch to better glimpse Lucius's reaction.

The patriarch, still twisting and rotating the cane head, looked terribly bored. Finally he spoke. "When can you play your position next…son?"

Draco jumped. His eyes became as wide as the house elf's. "Madam Pomfrey hasn't told me, father."

Lucius tsked. "You should have asked. Or do you enjoy causing me ceaseless disappointment, Draco?"

"I…I never…never…I…"

"Oh, dash it all, Draco, stop babbling, I'll do it myself. POPPY. Oh, Poppy, old girl, I do say, may we have a word?"

Madam Pomfrey came bustling out of her office looking harried and slightly sweaty. "YES, Mr. Malfoy?" she growled.

"A PRIVATE word, please?" Lucius gave an unneeded toss of his long, black velvet bowtied silver mane, in the direction of the office.

It occurred to Renard that Lucius could do with sticking a tie on his head and laughing at himself for once. Hell, _smiling_ would be an improvement. It also occurred to him that he could count every noble piece of snot up the patriarch's nose the way Lucius kept casting haughty gazes round the infirmary. He thought actually doing this aloud would, however, be a fairly imprudent gesture.

"A QUICK word, perhaps," the head nurse sighed, beckoning him impatiently.

The elder Malfoy smiled too cordially at his wife. "When you are ready, do join us," he cooed. Then he turned on his heel and followed Madam Pomfrey without a second backward glance at his son.

Renard snorted loudly into the cold vapor, pretending to be otherwise occupied. His eyes, however, never left the mother and son on the bed next to his own.

Narcissa's nails were painted an icy blue-white pearl, but there were splotches around the edges of her fingers as though she had been interrupted in the process, or as if she had painted them too hastily. Renard saw that Draco had noticed this too, and seemed strangely pained by it. "Mother," the boy murmered, "I'm really okay. I'm not five anymore, you know."

"Yes…yes, I do know that, Draco, but there's no need to rush blindly into manhood," Narcissa breathed. "It won't….you know….help….with your father." The crease between her eyebrows deepened and she fished inside the pockets of a glistening silver satchel bag. She pulled out a small gold foiled box and opened it, revealing a long thin bar of chocolate. "Some sort of tasty toffee I imported from Northeastern wizarding Europe," she explained, while her son's face brightened a modicum. "They call it Skor….snatched the recipe off some Muggle-born named Hershey. Oh, Lord," and here she gave a light giggle that tinkered like a bag of galleons, "don't tell your father, you know how he thinks anything of Muggle origin is an abomination, even if we wizards have improved upon it vastly. Go on, eat."

Draco seized the culinary treasure, gave his mother an almost sheepish smile, and murmured his thanks.

She leaned over him and stiffly kissed his forehead before lurching back to the sound of arguing in Madam Pomfrey's office. With a worried noise in her throat and a crackle of her taffeta gown, she glided into the office, accidentally leaving the door slightly ajar.

Renard suppressed a snort.

Talk about "inexcusable." He remembered one incident during which his father had been so…cold…when he had been a child of four years and too shy to transform into a fox for an entire parlor stuffed with Victor's colleagues from the Foreign Branch of the Ministry of Magic. Victor had yanked his son into the vast kitchen down the hall and tyrannically brandished the guilt card next to the cheese trays—to this day, absurdly, Renard still associated his father's anger with the sour-sweet scent of Brie—until Odile had swept in, eyes blazing, and shoved a bottle of her best extremely well aged Chardonnay into her husband's hands. _Go get tipsy with the Delacours and the Maximes and the Devereux's, but let Alexis alone, _she had snarled, and Victor had never tried to force his son's hand like that ever again….He had even _apologized_.

Renard had a feeling Draco was not such a priority to either of his parents.

At the moment, the boy in question appeared to be relishing the rich Skor his mother had imported. His long fair eyelashes slid shut as he gnawed on the candy bar, obstructing sight of his pale, burnished silver irises—his father's irises.

Renard grinned just slightly. That kid was, at times, ridiculously rude for someone fluent in several languages, wise to each individual classical wizarding composer and artist, and cognizant of every small detail of social decorum: down to the most minute of differentiations in forks, knives, and spoons at a formal dinner. He devoured the candy now, right in front of the hungry Beauxbatons transfer student, with not a glint of compunction. It was a gesture that was both self-centered comfortable, assured in the Animagus's basic goodness and unwillingness to covet or judge. Renard could not decide whether he found it annoying or endearing.

Probably both, he mused, while Draco licked each and every sticky fingertip, eyelids still fluttering in the sheer ecstasy of his treat.

"So, is it any good?" he grinned.

Draco nodded, slowly. "Ohhh yes. I…" But he got no further, for Madam Pomfrey suddenly shot out of her office, hands full of potions and ointments for other ailing students, her face drawn and ruddy with exasperation. She left the door, previously cracked, now flung fully open. Lucius and Narcissa, still shelled inside the room, did not seem to notice the way that this stripped all confidentiality in their conversation.

Lucius spoke in a bored purr with a twinge of exasperation. "I cannot tolerate him, Narcissa. I cannot be emotionally present when he WAILS so. He is the neediest boy I have ever encountered. Always shouting angrily or whining or clinging to me. He even cries. I haven't the time for him to be a silly little child when I require that he be what I need him to be. He's nearly fourteen now, and we've spoiled him disgustingly. I have no energy to abide his constant demand for my….feelings. I'm his father, not his therapist."

"Yes, darling," Narcissa's voice drifted in with taut, icy pleasantry, "but perhaps if you accompanied your indulgence of our son's wants with a bit more attention to what he says and feels, he would be a bit less persnickety and…difficult…"

"If you are asking me to let him start thinking his OWN irrelevant thoughts, dear heart," came the oily rebuttal, "then I should almost doubt YOUR sanity. Wanting him at Hogwarts just to keep him closer than Durmstrang. I allowed you that when he was eleven. Yes, such was the indulgence of his very young years, but Draco is becoming a man now. He is nothing if not a servant to the Malfoy heritage, to our legacy. He will become what is necessary. That is all. I say, you know he lost the Quidditch match today to _That Boy POTTER_? Even after his LIFETIME of flying lessons? Honestly, Narcissa….we must consider these things heavily."

"Lucius," more urgently, "something bad is going to happen if you keep invalidating every word out of our child's mouth. He fears offering even a BREATH of dissent from your will already, so swift are you to then mandate that the both of us withdraw from him."

"NARCISSA!" A soft but ferocious hiss. "If Draco's temperament SO pains you, then I am DEEPLY disturbed, and perhaps, my DEAR, a CRUCIO is in order, to straighten him up? Would you like that, Cissa? WOULD you?"

Silence, unbearable silence, followed.

Draco's mother must have yielded to her husband's will, for the room retained an arctic peace. They must have been pacified. At least Lucius was, and that apparently was all that mattered.

Renard cast Draco a sidelong look; the boy was clutching the curtains that veiled them inside the hospital beds far too tightly.

The Animagus wanted badly to offer some words of condolence, but all he could muster was resting a hand on the much younger boy's tense shoulder. If Draco appreciated the act, he did not acknowledge it, but he at least must not resent it, or he would have, in his distraught state, certainly bucked Renard's hand from his body. In any case, the French student's mind was on Haylin Daire, his best friend, his brother, a werewolf cast out of his reproachful father's presence, too, and forever, because of his ailment. He realized Haylin had endured everything that Draco had and far worse. His eyes misted and his heart throbbed terribly with the thought.

How many angry, hurting people did he know, unwittingly, who so suffered with no escape from the family they still considered their sole haven? How many kids like him, shy of 18 years?

He forced himself to turn his mind back on Draco, who had turned a wild-eyed prey's frozen watchfulness on him. Hostile—daring a word or a judgment.

Renard took that dare, in a gentle voice. "So…your papa….has he….ever…?"

Draco swallowed. "Not yet. No. But he…made me watch him perform it on a business colleague whom he…rather disliked…so that anytime I crossed him later on, all he had to say was…um... 'remember Mr. Rotticks from the Ministry, Draco.'" He set his delicate young jaw, turning away again, and forced a laugh. "Rather….silly."

"Not exactly," Renard replied softly. "It's actually quite awful."

"Well, WHY?" Suddenly Draco was furious. His pupils dilated to broad predatory holes in his bright irises. "I do it on ants and spiders all the time. Crucios, I mean. Doesn't make a bloody bit of difference…"

"It does on PEOPLE." Renard stood his ground, reminded again, painfully, of Haylin, who had become obsessed with the Dark Arts of late. He watched Draco closely.

To his surprise, the boy's eyes gained a wet sheen alongside their ferocity. "I LOVE him. Okay? Do you GET it? I LOVE my f-father."

"Of course you do. And you hate him, too."

"Y-YES! Yes, exactly!"

Renard sighed and nodded. His gaze grew gentler still.

Draco wiped irritably, quickly, at his eyes. "You know what's funny?" Suddenly he was whispering.

Renard didn't dare breathe, listening attentively.

Draco continued, taking the muteness as an encouragement. "He's always telling me what I think. Sometimes I don't know if he's READING my mind or putting shite INTO it, I forget what parts of it all I was thinking and what parts he SAID I was thinking… well…anyway….He showed me what a dementor looked like when I was four, you know?"

_Four. The age of the dinner party where Renard's mama, Odile, had refused to force even a moment of discomfort on him for Victor's satisfaction…_

" …And I saw it and said, 'father, I'm scared of that thing.' And he and mum sort of …laughed…and then he said, 'Oh no, you're not. You're not scared, Draco. You WANT to see a dementor very badly. You're happy as a lark. You silly boy, WHO TOLD YOU you were scared?' Like I needed to be told….by someone besides _me_…" Draco's face was crinkled now, very peculiarly, as though he had just realized something very crucial, and very unsettling.

Renard sighed. "You must have lost your trust in your own feelings, then. And you got punished and left alone whenever you had them. So you…stopped having them."

This time the heir of the Malfoy legacy, who owned everything that a moderately powerful prince or demigod might own, and yet really possessed nothing of REAL import… was the one to fall mute—and to stay that way. He looked paler than ever.

"I remember your mother," he wheezed suddenly, looking meaningfully at Renard, whose mama, Dr. Odile Renard, had been in and out of the psychiatric ward of St. Mungo's for roughly a decade for paranoid schizophrenia. Renard jolted at the pang in his chest, for he knew Draco was being sincere and there was a bittersweet feeling to the memory of his mother, arguably the best Healer in European Wizardy if not beyond, in her prime…before… "She was nice."

"Oh really?" the sixth year croaked, clearing his throat fiercely.

"Yeah." The boy infamous for his incorrigibility and cruelty now regarded his elder with eyes the color of the sky as a violent afternoon stormcloud begins to recede. Almost kindly. "…Yeah. She was _really nice_ to….to _them…_one time." He nodded into the other room, where his parents still sat in icy silence.

"I know she was," Renard replied with a thin smile. "I meant I didn't know you REMEBERED it."

**_Mid August, 12 summers before the Goblet of Fire_**

_"You know _your _mother, Malfoy?" said Harry… "that expression she's got, like she's got dung under her nose? Has she always looked like that, or was it just because you were with her?"_

_Malfoy's pale face went slightly pink._

_"Don't you dare insult my mother, Potter."_

_--from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, by J.K. Rowling._

St. Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Mysteries was exceedingly quiet until five after midnight. The man with the long silver blond hair and the purple-black aristocratic squire's garments arrived in the reception area then, his starched white dress shirt untucked under his jacket and spattered in blood, having burst through the entryway of Purge and Dowse, Ltd, carrying a profusely bleeding woman with equally arctic hair and pale skin, her neck and chest gushing red. He struck the Welcoming Witch, a plump sandy-haired individual of great sangfroid working the front desk, as someone who usually took great pains to appear impeccably comely, but, in the current situation, was rather disheveled and very distraught. Behind him, the Witch noted with a small pang of sympathy, toddled a boy, no older than two or three, who too possessed a towhead and exceedingly fair skin now flushed with tears of horror.

The sire's sleek white-blond mane strung down in his eyes and over his gritted jaw as he seethed glassy-eyed through his teeth, "MY WIFE. HURT. HEALER. NOW." Though jeweled with tears, there was something in his staggeringly cold, pale gray eyes that issued a warning of the great imprudence of argument, so the front desk clerk sent an owl back to the emergency clinic Healers at once. There was an immediate maelstrom of thundering feet in the halls.

A superior Healer, indicated by the gold trimming around her wand and bone embroidered uniform patch, dashed out into the hallway, her lime green robes billowing with her momentum. There was a fixed alert but calm glare on her face, a peach-cream complexion with light freckles on her straight, small nose, her spike-tipped mid-neck deep auburn hair flung from her eyes as she barked for a stretcher with an indeterminate European accent. Her eyes, the kindest and warmest and most brilliant of blue, fell on the man and his child as the wife and mother was lain on the stretcher moaning and writhing. It was clear to her at once that the man was not used to being reduced to requests for assistance, nor the child used to fear, and both stood there helplessly struggling.

"Mummy? _Mummy?"_ the tiny, thin-boned boy whimpered, clambering in the way of the nurses, reaching up for his marred mother, and his father harshly drew him away with a soft snarl of, "Be _quiet_, Draco, and _MOVE_!"

The child squealed out a terrified and enraged sob; his own silver eyes were twins of his father's, but so much larger and brighter. "But father, she's _dying!"_

"No, she isn't." The Healer smiled placatingly, approaching them, her broad catlike lips curling compassionately upward. She spoke in a deep and textured contralto, briskly nodding. She moved over the bleeding blond woman and placed her bare hands on the woman's gashed neck as they sprinted together to the back operating room. The father was forced to pick up his toddling son and carry him as their speed increased; a numb, mask-like expression now covered his previously disturbed face. His son still wept bitterly as Odile continued, "Please be at ease, I think you brought your wife in just in time, Mr…?"

"Malfoy," the man gasped out in a strangely breathless, hissing voice. "Lucius Malfoy." For a fleeting instant his eyes again betrayed a helplessness with which he was obviously unaccustomed.

"And your wife, Lucius, is…?"

"Narcissa." An added strain to this name's utterance.

"Alright. Dr. Odile Renard, if you please. I will see to it that your son…Draco, is it?….can see his mama alive by morning."

The man had stopped moving and was staring at her unabashedly, with a candidness that again struck her as something far from customary to his personality. _"Odile?"_ he breathed. "….So. You married Victor after all." Considerable, smooth contempt now gathered about his words, and disdain began to contaminate his hapless fear. He resumed his speedy glide in the direction of the floating stretcher alongside which she ran, because Odile had not even slowed down when he had abruptly halted.

The mediwitch gave a small groaning sigh mid-examination of the patient named Narcissa; excellent, she had run into one of the English Ministry of Magic colleagues of her husband, an internationally renowned transfiguration scholar from Marseilles, France, in the middle of an emergency job. "Sir, with all due respect, I haven't the time…."

Her moon blue eyes snapped up reprovingly, but then she really saw the disheveled man before her. His hair had been much shorter back then, his body less firmly built.…he had been but a boy of sixteen or seventeen, at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, the year she came as an exchange student from Beauxbatons Academy of France. But those eyes were the same—elfish somehow, large but ever narrowed as though in scrutiny or suspicion, and a very pale, very cold gray.

"_Lucius?_ Oh my God, Lucius _Malfoy. You _have a child now _too_…how _amazing." _Briefly, she turned those luminous azure eyes on the child in the cold, authoritarian man's arms and smiled, and managed thus to derive a smile from his fearful little cherubin face. He was as fair and elegantly formed as his father, a smaller, weaker-boned, and more innocent variant of the pater familias, she plainly saw—though emotionally perhaps a bit more demonstrative, as, in response to her smile, he began to reach out his little round arms toward her.

It struck her poignantly of her own husband and their brilliant, extroverted, often slightly precocious seven-year-old son, Alexis. She squeezed the child Draco's tiny pale fingers once before his father softly scolded him for his "sauciness" and yanked him away. Hesitantly, the boy buried his tear-streaked face in his father's neck and nestled against him, causing Lucius to shiver as though something itchy or dirty had touched his skin, but, with the present company, he did not repel his son. It was almost as if the child knew this and was taking advantage of Odile's tempering presence to be able to touch his father.

Odile frowned and elaborated, "I er…wasn't paying attention when you told me who you….please have a seat outside these doors.." Odile gestured at the uncomfortable stiff mahogany chairs outside the intensive care unit. "When your wife is better, we _must _catch up…"

"Of course," Lucius murmured haughtily, staring fixedly over her head, his nostrils frozen into a displeased upward curl, occasionally tugging his head to the side with a little snarl of his pursed lips when his son clung too hard and tightly to his hair. "When you have healed her…Dr. Renard."

Odile nodded once more and leaned over the woman's face, into her ear. She spoke slowly and clearly, stroking the injured woman's icy hair gently. "Narcissa, you must breathe with me, when I say, and try to focus on breathing instead of the pain. It looks as though you have been mauled by some manner of large serpent?" She looked up at the father again, for an explanation.

Lucius Malfoy shook his head once, sharply. "Not exactly. We have many pet snakes, but none capable of this. It was made to appear that way, but she….She ah…did this to…to _herself_." He spoke with a diplomat's perfect restraint, but his voice still shook and was very, very tight. "My…son saw it."

Odile stiffened almost imperceptibly, staring at the child's trembling little back. "…I see. There are several complicated curses that can cause this kind of damage, especially when self-directed. Fortunately, all of them are healable when given attention within a certain frame of time. Narcissa is very lucky that your son discovered her when he did." She was aiming her wand at the woman's throat now, as if welding together small patches of skin to tide her over till proper magical surgical procedures were undertaken behind the operating room doors. Narcissa Malfoy moaned softly.

Lucius Malfoy visibly flinched at this sight, and at the Odile's open, albeit tactful, acknowledgment that his toddler son, rather than himself, had discovered his wife on the brink of successful suicide. On his formidably controlled face, however, it looked more like a nervous tic under his left eye than a twinge of guilt. Were it not a kink of her imagination, the mediwitch thought she perhaps saw him holding the child, Draco, an inch closer to his chest.

And so Odile's heart softened once more. "Mr. Malfoy…Lucius…be at ease now. I am going to take your wife into this room and bring her back to us. You have my word." And, flourishing her wand briskly at the stretcher, she forced Narcissa back through the double doors of the St. Mungo's operating room, leaving Malfoy and his small trembling legacy alone in the waiting room.

_"__He had heard the one from his mother about how he was younger and his father burned his ass because his dad didn't know how warm to make the bath water for babies. His mother had (laughingly) told him that he was dropped into the water after he broke out into screams. He could've drowned (but no, he didn't believe his father would have let him drown). And his mother had (laughingly) told him that his father was sick to his stomach over it, literally sick, puked into a trash can—over the guilt of burning his baby's ass and almost being stupid enough to drown him because he was such an inadequate parent that couldn't even bathe his child." –from Happy Hour by B-K_

Dr. Renard found the father and son still seated where she had left them, after a long toiling night's work of countercurses and old-fashioned Muggle stitchwork. This Narcissa Malfoy had certainly intended never to reawaken when she had turned her wand at her own throat; her curses had been multifaceted, exceedingly, deceptively complex. Precisely what breed of misery veiled itself within the ice crystal palace of Malfoy Manor?

Lucius Malfoy was as subdued as before, exuding chilly, pretended control over his environment, sitting with impatient regality in the farthest mahogany waiting room chair. His arms were folded across his dark-clad chest like those of a mirthless, irritable genie. Hair still in long, wild platinum blond disarray, clothes still bloodstained, he seemed particularly put out by his own disheveled state, when witches and wizards most likely far below his social and economic standing bustled past from one room to the next looking twice as collected and polished. Once again, Odile was struck with the realization that this was an experience with which he was highly unaccustomed.

The little boy, Draco, wandering the perimeters of the waiting room unchecked and ignored, had withdrawn to the comforting imaginary world of infants and toddlers, in which no state or mood was permanent, and he was certain that his mummy would walk right out of the operating room sometime soon as though utterly unmarred—as though it had all been a particularly lurid nightmare. Odile was very grateful to the higher powers that she could at least in good part provide such an end for the child.

Presently the boy paused, tottered over to her and smiled the impish smile of an infant accustomed to being doted upon for even small feats of cuteness and precocity—but not by the parent with which he was now stuck. In Odile he seemed to be seeking a temporary Narcissa, while the intolerable indifference of his father had to also be borne. "H'llo, thah," he squeaked saucily up at the mediwitch. "Fix mummy?"

Odile grinned at this query, amused by the boy's nerve when he was not so distraught. It reminded her once again of her own son, who was due with his father any time now; Victor and Alexis regularly came over during Victor's lunch hour to eat with her, as, with her long hours in the hospital emergency room, it was often their only way of seeing her all day.

"I did, indeed, Draco," she presently replied. "Give your mummy a day to rest, and you can come visit her this evening. And give her some time to feel happier, too, because that won't be fixed quite so quickly. That will take a lot of time. But it's not your fault that she is so sad. Sometimes ladies get things called chemicals in their brains a little mixed up for a short while after they have babies, and it is called post-partum depression."

"Is that why mummy doesn't pick me up sometimes when I cry?" the boy piped in curiously, wrinkling his miniscule nose as though something smelled rancid. "Mummy gives me lots of Hunny-dewwks choc'lates when she doesn't pick me up, though," he added in her defense, with a slightly vicious little scowl.

Odile forcefully restrained herself from sweeping the child up into a maternal embrace. "Yes, sweetheart, that is why. But nothing you could have done could have made it better or worse—so don't be upset at yourself. And I am sure mummy and daddy would rather you be born than not." She glanced over at Lucius when stating this, musing upon how attuned he was to this conversation.

Draco twisted his fragile little neck backwards to observe his father as well. He looked a little frightened, but mostly his big gray eyes glazed over as he stared at Lucius, and they were disturbingly unexpectant of any real response.

Lucius was in fact watching them closely, almost feverishly, his eyes glittering brightly again. "…Indeed," he muttered tersely, after a long silence.

Odile smiled softly at the untamed expression, seeming to disarm her old schoolmate, for he lowered his arctic, narrow gaze again to the floor. He gave no further response, and the French mediwitch was slightly disappointed in the miserly manner of his compassion towards his child. Perhaps he was merely stressed over his wife's condition…But she had just assured them both of Narcissa's health, had she not?

Draco cocked his towhead at Odile, tiny pink nose once again a-crinkle, then his great gray eyes roved. He let out a sudden squeal of glee and rocketed off after a passing stretcher, on which lay a cranky-looking wizard whose left arm had been turned into a large green slug, its slimy hindside dragging across the hospital floor. "YOU BUST, BIG FAHHT SLUGGIE!" he shrieked, giggling, jubilant with the news of his mother's renewed health. He kicked at the arm-invertebrate, possessing, at the moment, an angelic face with a devil's expression. "YOU BUST! ZILLION FAHHT SLUGGIES NOW! SQUISH!"

_CRUNCH CRUNCH! Take that, snow, you insubordinate BASTARD! HA! _

Odile barked with giggles but then covered her mouth, muffling her unprofessional laughter, while Lucius came fiercely to life, sweeping out of his seat, gliding over to his son, and scooping him up just as Draco lost his footing in a pus-like trail of snail mucus. The child screeched another triumphant laugh and spread his little arms wide while his father, whose lips had gone thin and white, returned him to the waiting room cubicle. "Lookit, fathah, see? SEE? WATCH ME WATCH ME! I busted the sluggie!" His eyes narrowed comically in his young face as he mulled something over, then poised a chubby hand at the departing slime-encased individual as though holding a wand. "CRUCIO, SLUGGIE, CRUCI— "

And Lucius exploded.

"YOU STOP THAT this INSTANT! For God's sake, we don't SAY those spells, and you KNOW that!" It was no louder than a whisper, but it was so ferocious that Draco at once fell to terrified silence. He shriveled into a ball in his father's arms.

"But fathah, you just…."

More calmly now, but in a saccharine, patient chirp, "Son, we do NOT SAY Unforgivable Curses."

"But," and little Draco, eyes flooding with fresh tears, parried with a tone for which the term "whiny" was a polite understatement, "Fathaaaaaah, I thought …that one time when you showed me that thingieeeee with the house elf and it went all stiff and wrigglyyyyyy…"

"_ShhhhhhhhhQUIET, I will buy you a new trainer broom if you're QUIET!_" Lucius grabbed his son's shoulders and shook him once, so violently that Odile winced. Draco went limp under the iron grip but shut up. The confusion of pleasure at the pending present and terror at his father's rage grew audible: He let out a frustrated squeak, cheeks pinking, and brooded at his father's silver serpent cufflinks. The elder Malfoy glared restlessly round the waiting room. His eyes fell in an almost paranoid fashion on Odile once again and she swallowed. "Quiet," he mumbled again, still looking at her.

"Lucius," she breathed soothingly, "perhaps we should go clean Draco up while I wait for my husband and son to come visit me."

With the hand not occupied in clutching his child, Malfoy rummaged, with a frenzy barely concealed by stoicism, through a sort of black leather diaper bag with the initials "NBM" encased in bronze on the hook. He spurned the Healer, back turned haughtily to her. He growled at the mucus smearing all over his rich violet-black robes, as Draco gained a firmer grip on him. "THANK you, Odile, but I can…."

"Please."

The slug-slime-soaked toddler watched and waited, gazing anxiously between parent and doctor, over his father's shoulder. He gnawed on his tiny, petulant lip.

Finally Lucius buckled. Visibly. His shoulders shuddered once and drooped. A strong, elegant hand massaged a temple. His back was still towards her when he spoke again. "Odile," he sighed, and she got the feeling his voice was suddenly very soft to hide any loss of emotional control, "how does one DO this?"

And she knew he didn't mean washing off a child, or scolding a child for using expletives and curses, but rather something bigger and more intimidating and all-encompassing: being a father, even being a _dad_. Being what her husband, whom Lucius despised, whom Lucius many, _MANY_ years ago had wanted to BE, clearly was to her own son. But he would never ask that explicitly, nor ask even vaguely, like this, again. She knew the proud, chilly Slytherin boy from Hogwarts at least that well.

"With devotion and practice," she breathed back, approaching cautiously, and resting a finger…just a pinky finger, for his pride was THAT sensitive….on his shoulder. "Let me show you. Come back to the operating washroom. We can use the sink and soap back there. Draco can have some purple plastic gloves. Would you like purple plastic gloves, Draco?"

The little boy gave a sound between a coo and a squeal. "Coooooool….."

"She was never supposed to leave me alone with him," Lucius hissed tartly through his teeth, as though the child could somehow not hear the conversation between the two adults—as though the child could not see the brooding expression radiating off his face. "My father never dealt with ME. It's just _not done_. Not in MY family. It's _unnecessary_. Why DID Narcissa do this to _ME_?" He threw her a heavy-hooded expression through his moonlight blond mane, a sighing look, anticipating that she would commiserate.

But the warped nature of this train of thought made Odile blink, stunned.

_Why did your wife punish YOU with HER intolerable depression and misery?_ _With HER suffering? Why did she PUNISH you by giving you time with your ONLY CHILD?_

Then she recovered. "Ah…_oui_, yes, I see that the surgeons have just now left…" She tugged gently on the disgruntled patriarch's velvet robe sleeve; it was warm and soft and she marveled, as she steered him into the washroom, at how a man with so many standoffish, intimidating traits could yet seem so pleasant upon physical contact. She marveled at how, were she not happily married, she might still harbor some sort of lurid attraction for the glacier named Lucius Malfoy. But then she remembered the sickly weaving of serpent and skull that still branded the flesh of his hidden forearm like some skin disease….and despite all the rumors, despite his pious pleas of "helpless to the Imperius Curse, innocent bystander" to the Ministry…. Odile had always sensed a darkness that emanated from Lucius, a readiness to hurl spite….the kind of hazard that is beautiful and hideous at once, that both thrills and terrifies, like first sight of a particularly violent but distant storm, or a cobra recoiling in the underbrush by one's bared ankle….

And so the goosebumps of pleasure brought by his presence always replaced themselves with those of foreboding, and the matter was once again closed: They could never be close, not even as friends. Victor had been a Slytherin in his own days as an exchange student to Hogwarts from Beauxbatons Academy. Yet he had flatly refused to accept Lucius's clearing of the charger of Death Eater by Cornelius Fudge only a year or so ago, and while Monsieur Renard could never "forbid" his wife from doing as she well pleased, Odile knew her husband was a wise and unwaveringly ethical man, and so, on this matter, she heeded his instincts.

The washbasin was like a large stainless steel bathtub raised to the level of an adult's arms. Odile reached for the golden faucet and a warm flow of water spilled down into the basin. She gestured at Lucius to put his son down in the edge. Malfoy did so; Draco stripped his shoes and gooey shirt at once and squealed happily, kicking his legs and splashing both adults with a rascally grin. Odile laughed appreciatively and lightly splashed him back.

Lucius's jaw jutted, but he wiped the water off his face and reached for the hot faucet. "It seems a bit cold," he mumbled, twisting it, but the moment the steaming liquid poured into the pool and touched the child's skin, Draco let out a shriek of pain and clutched pleadingly to his father's neck.

Lucius turned the water off at once, his body rigid, his face the epitome of humiliation. He felt the water and drew his hand back quickly, scalded. "God damn it," he hissed. Odile had never felt so sorry for a parent and child in all her life.

"The plumbing here is absolutely archaic," she crooned. "I'm sorry, I should have warned you." She dipped her hands into the basin and stirred the water until it became tepid once again.

Lucius grunted but otherwise remained silent; Draco, for his part, did not let go of his father for several moments, until the water had cooled. Then his fair, bare back, blotchy red from the burning water, eased back down, and he smiled up at the adults more tentatively, his enormous pale eyes watchful.

Lucius stared at his son for a long awkward moment before pulling together a very small smile in return.

Draco squealed again and splashed again, more gently, then watched and waited again.

His father's smile broadened, and what was more, Lucius didn't wipe the water off this time.

So Draco splashed again, with an impudent screech of laughter, and as forcefully as he could muster. Lucius was now soaked but still smiling—even chuckling. Odile rolled up her sleeves and seized a bar of antibacterial soap, trying not to let her own grin seem too obvious.

"Good," she murmered, "very good. Hold still, little one." She massaged lather through the towhead and behind the tiny pink ears, deriving a ticklish shudder and giggle from the littlest Malfoy.

"I like bahhths! They smell GOOD!" the child bellowed.

"Good God, Draco, not so loudly," Lucius haughtily retorted, but he was still laughing.

"M-kay, fathah." Draco giggled clumsily as his entire head was rubbed full of soap suds. "I said bahhths smell good," he repeated in an exaggerated whisper, and this time both adults laughed, and sincerely. The child beamed and leaned against his father's chest with another almost experimental giggle.

"You should take over," Odile inserted into the opportune tender moment, handing the soapbar and a soft sponge to Lucius.

"I'm sorry?" he said in a strangled tone, dangling both items as though they had been sneezed upon. He looked oddly terrified. His son did not move; Draco's great eyes had drooped peacefully shut.

"I said you should take over. He'd prefer his papa to a stranger, I am sure." Odile stood. She bent over and breathed, "Gently, patiently, that is how one does it, old friend. You are his world."

_Don't abandon or abuse that fact. _

Lucius gave no indication of whether or not he heard the mediwitch, but regardless, he set out bathing his child at once. The occasional murmer of "lift your arms" or "now, rinse," punctuated the silence between father and son, but other than that only the sound of gently sloshing water and a child's yawning accompanied Odile's ears out of the washroom.

Fifteen minutes passed before all hell broke loose. Odile was perched on a cushioned green chenille armchair that matched her Healer's robes, smack in the middle of the nurse's station, reviewing some old patient records during a lag in emergency calls when her husband and son arrived for lunch.

Victor Renard glided like a black swan on water, his silken ebony hair pulled back into a sleek queue and topped with a bronze fox-engraved circlet on his forehead, his face the sculpted, warm olive of a Marseillaise Frenchman. His entrance into St. Mungo's front lobby, midnight blue silk robes billowing, always drew a crowd of doe-eyed young nurses, despite their knowledge of his devoted marriage to the Chief Mediwitch on staff. As ever, grasping his energetic son Alexis's hand, he waved at them all with a charming little collected smile, his dark brown eyes sparkling and his trim black moustache curling up.

Then he bent and mumbled at his child to wave too, his grin broadening. Alexis, a carbon copy of his father at seven, aside having a short untidy haircut and his mother's radiant blue eyes, obliged, with great gusto, giggling loudly, and all the lady nurses tittered dotingly at their little seven-year-old mascot before the Renard men slid into the welcome nurse's station.

Odile gave a sigh of mock exasperation, an auburn eyebrow cocked as she stood to greet them. "Here comes my beloved Trouble and my beloved Trouble, Jr."

"MAMA!" the boy howled, rushing her with wide-spread arms. He pointed at the brown sack his father carried. "_J'avais choisit votre_…."

"In English while we are in England, my Little Helper," she corrected him with a kiss to his cheeks. "It is the polite thing to do."

Victor grunted and nodded his agreement, with a small wry smile. "He is just eager to share, darling," he rumbled, and Odile grinned back at her husband, nodding and winking knowingly.

Alexis glanced between both parents before scowling in thought, and starting up again in English that was only slightly accented, "Ah peecked your lunch at the deli today, mama. Your very favorite. Ham and cheese and eggs sandwich!"

"Why, Lexi, my love, how very thoughtful. And your English just keeps improving, chere." She smoothed his black bangs out of his eyes. Alexis changed into a fox and back into a human with an impish snicker, completely disheveling his hair again.

Odile tsked at him and ruffled his bangs now, assisting him in his rebellious appearance. Then she took the sack from his father, who was now softly chuckling.

Still laughing, Victor leaned over Alexis and kissed his wife deeply. The boy grinned contentedly up at them and clutched the hem of both their robes territorially and confidently as they chatted. Something caught his eye and he blinked and strayed across the station to investigate, occasionally glancing back and smiling at his parents.

Victor sat down on a stool by his wife's cushy green chair. "You asked me to order some wood sorrel for your home experimental store?" he murmured. "I added tomatoes to the order because that way Alexis and I can coerce you to make our favorite tomato basil soup. And since there is a possibility you may be expecting a er…." He placed a be-ringed finger on her stomach and beamed, turning the slightest shade of pink.

"Oh, my sneaky Slytherin love," she crooned back with a mischievous second wink. "Very well, I will succumb to your request that I…."

The sound of small, scuffling footsteps suddenly halting directly in front of them made both their heads turn.

Odile blinked in shock; the toddler Draco Malfoy, freshly swathed in borrowed green Healer robes, was standing in front of her, clinging to her own son's robe sleeve, grinning wickedly up at all of them.

With them both, she recognized a third child who had strayed into the station, a boy with green eyes and curly strawberry blond hair, Haylin something-or-another, around Alexis's age; she had mended his broken arm earlier that morning and his older brother Aidan and father Alastair were sitting in the waiting room while his bone-growing potion took its effects. Apparently the two visiting children had taken to Alexis; they seemed quite smug that they had obtained V.I.P. status in the illustrious wizarding hospital through association with her son, who seemed to be leading them about on a guided tour of the nurse's station.

Haylin shuffled his feet and grinned around, dimples forming on his round little face. Draco continued to clutch to Alexis and loudly proclaimed, "I caught the black foxie! I caught him!"

Odile barked a laugh, but Victor stiffened. "That child looks the spitting image of a Malfoy," he spoke in distaste.

Draco shrank back from the tall dark man glaring down at him.

"He is," the mediwitch nodded, placing a tempering hand on her husband's arm. "And he IS a CHILD, too. Draco, darling, your father will have kittens if he sees you've gone missing."

"Fortunately," a breathless voice issued from behind them all, as the very man in question strode up, "I seem to have relocated the little rapscallion." Lucius's face seemed to be struggling between rage and a determined sort of patience as he swept Draco away from Alexis, who blinked in puzzlement and turned to his own parents for an explanation.

Victor's look of vague dislike had become one of unabashed hatred as Lucius presented himself.

Lucius's expression, on which patience seemed to have triumphed over anger, now reverted to cold fury at the sight of this. A squawking nurse behind him was telling him to get out of the unauthorized area, but Odile held up her hand and shook her head sharply at her subordinate, who sighed and walked away. Lucius remained silent, fingers digging into his son's tiny shoulder as he bent over Draco. "….Victor," he finally snapped, with a sharp, guarded little nod. "Small world, indeed." The temperature in his eyes was subzero.

Draco looked terrified; it was as if he knew by heart the little warning signs, the cues, to his father's temper. He trembled bodily.

Still Alexis stared rapidly from one parent to the other; Odile held her hand out to him and drew him out of the line of fire. The boy Haylin followed her son, looking rather confused, unaware as to the years of discord between the two Slytherin alumni staring each other down at high noon.

"Oh, God, Lucius, what _did_ you do?" Victor purred deeply and derisively, his handsome tan face twisted into a sneer nearly as hateful as that of the man he addressed. He chuckled airily at Lucius's disgracefully unkempt state. "Performed a halfway _avada kedavra_ on someone, did you? And then your conscience annoyed you into bringing your victim in?"

"As a matter of fact," Malfoy snapped back, voice spiking, "my _wife_ is _ill_, you asinine, _half-witted…_ Frenchman." His lips curled into a snarl as he honed in for the jugular, his tone dipping back to a cool, weaving hiss-whisper. "Don't tell me you're still farting about with those trivial little transfiguration theories they've got cooking up for the International Confederation of Wizards. Oh, dear me, you _ARE_. Well then, how on EARTH dare you insult an aristocrat of some _REAL_ standing?" If it were possible, the way he spat and smirked at the elder Renard made his straight white canines seem to elongate into snakelike fangs.

Draco's cheeks flamed and he hid behind his father; he did not really understand what Lucius was saying, but the scene being caused seemed to register fully.

Lucius continued unabated, "OH, and DO let me guess, Victor, you STILL don't keep house elves at Renard Estate because you choose to sidestep the 'enslavement' of a _lesser_ species, correct? RIDICULOUS. How much more thoroughly can you insult your Pureblooded heritage?" He sniffed, and flashed a belittling leer, though the fingers of both his hands tightened around an invisible weapon, a wand or a cane of some sort, which he had evidently left at home and which he plainly itched to now wield. His nostrils flared with the final verbal blow. "Your poor wife, she deserves SO much better. But then again, Odile's charity has always been her downfall, _hasn't_ it?"

The child Alexis made an indignant noise in his throat and looked to Victor.

Odile was between the men before her husband could so much as raise his wand, which, judging by Victor's suddenly livid facial expression, was precisely what he intended to do. "Please, you two, not in the _hospital_…" Her blue eyes glimmered with understated anger.

_"MY WIFE chose me out of love, not pity, Malfoy!" _Victor snarled around her, though her presence, and the frightened stares of the three children, had already placated him, unlike Malfoy. "The only difference between our statures and credentials was my REFUSAL to cheer on the coming of the Heir of Slytherin and the death of COUNTLESS Muggle-borns!"

"And a puzzling refusal it was," Malfoy seethed openly, slate eyes ablaze. "_DISGUSTING!_ Perhaps the Sorting Hat is not ALWAYS infallible! You should have stayed at Beauxbatons, Renard, and eschewed cherished traditions THERE! Does your wife know of how you couldn't keep your filthy paws off of MINE back in our schooldays, back when I favored Odile instead? Or was Narcissa Black just another 'fling' for the _handsome French visitor_?"

"Fathah …" Draco squeaked. "I'm sorry I snuck off…I want to go home now…"

"Be QUIET, Draco," his father snarled, without even looking down.

Victor had gone stiff and stony, regarding Lucius like a maggot wriggling on the end of an otherwise fresh red apple. A small smile crept up his lips. He chuckled breathily. "You fool. You never had a chance with Odile. NEVER. She knows good from evil FAR too clearly. Look how you disregard your own CHILD." Then he looked down and saw HIS child's face, and his gaze softened. With visible effort, he backed off. "I spoke out of turn. I apologize. Really, I do. My kindest regards to Narcissa." He reached down and put a hand gently on the back of Alexis's neck, and the boy, who looked very frightened, started to relax.

The ensuing silence was deafening, and not bereft of considerable stares from hospital staff and patients passing by.

Lucius looked as though every fiber in his being were restraining him from launching bodily onto Victor. A vein in his forehead throbbed. "Come, Draco. We're going to visit your mother now," he murmured through his teeth. "That is, if her DOCTOR approves?" He cast a staggering, betrayed glare upon Odile, as though she had somehow deliberately lured him into this humiliating confrontation with her husband.

She nodded silently, the compassion and apology in the look she returned just as strong as was his rage. If he noticed, he gave no intimation. He lifted his toddler harshly into his arms, turned, and stalked out of sight. The last glimpse of Draco's face was one of wide-eyed abandonment.

Odile sighed deeply, tossed a displeased look at her husband, and followed the Malfoys out, hoping to lead them to their destination.

Victor cringed at her disappearing green form. "Oh dear. Lexi, I AM sorry for that….tense moment just now," he breathed, patting his son's back. "That was terribly inappropriate of me. We should not take advantage of someone's weak moments to belittle and be cruel to them. Remember that."

Alexis glanced at his new friend Haylin, who shrugged back, basically unshaken, and smiled puckishly. Then he nodded gravely at his father. "That's alright, papa. But we must get mama more of her red flowers to make her happy. And we must make HER some tomato basil soup."

"You are too young to worry about making everyone else happy, Alexis," Victor said soothingly.

"…Please, papa? I WANT to."

"…Alright, son. That is a very good idea." Victor stared past his child's head, where the Malfoys had recently disappeared, for a very long moment. "I am very proud of you, Alexis. Don't ever forget that, either."

The boy beamed. "Okay, papa," he said.

Upstairs, Lucius Malfoy stroked his wife Narcissa's hand while she wept hysterically about her act of "great selfishness," and Draco Malfoy hid under his mother's hospital bed and wept alone.

**_July, 2 summers before the Goblet of Fire_**

_"__Indifference and neglect often do more damage than outright dislike."—Professor Dumbledore, from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, by J.K. Rowling_

"_Your beliefs become your thoughts. Your thoughts become your words. Your words become your actions. Your actions become your habits. Your habits become your values. Your values become your destiny." –Mahatma Gandhi_

Draco Malfoy was scanning his father's domains, eating a Golden Delicious apple and looking disgustingly like a beautiful bacchanalian cherub with his sun-pinked cheeks, happily, smugly glittering eyes, and tousled platinum locks. Malfoy Manor was as Unplottable as a single hair on a wooly moor sheep, and this enabled the ancient wizarding family to keep tabs on the Muggles that swarmed about the silliest of tourist attractions, that insipid Stonehenge: It was quite literally in the first flat acre in front of the Manor, within viewing distance of the study and master bedroom windows. Stupid fools, the world thought his family closed-minded and elitist, but they had plenty of experience observing Mudbloods through the curtains after dinner. He'd watched them doing all their disgusting criminal things at the world landmark, usually under cover of dark.

Lucius had made a birthday tradition of taking Draco to the master bedroom window, while Narcissa still slept under the satin sheets, right as red-amber dawn burst through inky darkness, to point out yet another atrocious act of Muggle ignorance and corruption. The day he turned six, he'd seen two men, one wearing an orange band and the other a large silver crucifix, both shouting in thick Irish accents, grappling at the foot of Stonehenge, slashing each other with knives until a river of red soaked the grass….The day he turned eight he saw a blubbering, waif-thin girl of sixteen abandoning her infant child beneath one of the stone monoliths…The day he turned ten, there were two men in fine attire dragging another girl, who looked strikingly similar to the desperate mother of his eighth birthday, up against another portion of the monument, hiking up her tattered skirt, pulling down their Armani trousers, holding her down, jerking violently up and down on top of her….

She was trying to scream, and for a moment Draco felt pity for a Muggle that overrode his disgust of her attackers….For, aside the way robes were replaced with business suits, he really could see no difference between those men and the likes of his father's dinner party guests, and that was scary as hell….

Lucius had told him to look away then, in a strangely dead voice, covering his son's eyes with a cold, clammy hand. "Never forget what you have seen, Draco," he had breathed, and Draco had forgotten his doubts and his pity for the Muggle woman. He had nodded fervently up at his father, because it felt special to have that single, silent moment of communion between the two of them alone, before the dawn, before the rest of the world was awake—even if only to commiserate about the deep-rooted evil of the mudbloods that crept their way into wizardry.

"OWCH, bloody hell!" Draco scowled down at his left forearm, from which a large black wasp was escaping. His eyes shined malevolently and he drew his wand, dropping the apple. "_Imperio,_" he hissed, as a jet of light wove from the wand to the insect. It floated dully midair and he sneered, so caught up in the glee of vengeance that the trickle of blood dripping off his forearm went unattended. "Do a little tango for me, old boy." The wasp lurched to and fro and did a few somersaults midair. "Lovely. _Crucio." _The wasp writhed in anguish. Draco laughed. "Perfect. Beautiful. Well done, you little bastard. Better than you, aren't I? HA!"

"Oh Draco, darling, dinner is ready!" Narcissa's tinkling soprano floated upward.

Draco blinked and looked below him and saw his mother waving at him, her pallid face stretched into an impeccable smile. He scoffed. It was almost as if she looked at her son as she would a teatime guest, rather than her own flesh and blood. Nevertheless, he waved at her indulgently and mustered a plastic smile of his own. "Be there in a minute, mother!" he crowed, turning and flipping on his Nimbus, trying a Wronskei Feint or two, and grinning more broadly at the sound of her fawning "oo's" and "aahhh's" from the ground.

Finally he landed, wiping his hair out of his sunkissed face, striking a strapping, smug pose of "Here I AM, world!"

"You're going to burn in an hour or two, I just know it," Narcissa fussed, petting his cheeks and sighing. "Dear LORD, why are you bleeding?" She touched his left forearm, wide-eyed.

"Mum, for God's Sake," Draco moaned, pulling away, straightening his t-shirt and shorts. "I'm…."

"Fourteen in three days, I KNOW," she cried. "I can count as well as you can, my dear child!" She flipped her wrists languidly, turning around and making three elegant strides toward the Manor doors…before stopping dead. She wheeled around. "MY GOD, Draco!" she hissed, face taut in sudden fear. "Where are your robes and crest? If your father sees…"

Draco sneered. "Tch! Left 'em out in the field near that Stonehenge thingie," he chirped saucily, jerking his head at some space behind him. "Father tried to make me wear 'em out in bloody boiling ninety degrees, but I figured a way 'round THAT!"

"Oh, did you?" came That Voice behind his mother, who winced.

In the span of a second, Draco's blowhart disregard became self-wetting terror. "Um, I…hullo, Dad."

"Father."

"FATHER! Yes, father. Hullo."

"Draco." Lucius loomed up beside his wife and placed an arm loosely round her shoulders. He cocked his head amiably at his son. SMILING. "Now…son…if you don't go fetch your Malfoy attributes before I have counted to ten, you will regret your capacity to breathe." And then the smile was gone. "ONE…"

Draco turned and bolted so fast across the hot green grass that blisters began to form on the soles of his feet. Everything was too bright, too vivid and in his face and ears, the smallest bird chirp was a screech and the palest of rays of dimming sunlight blinding. He could somehow still hear his father's calm drawl ("two….three…four…five…six…sevennnn…") as he arrived at the cypress sapling near the Muggle highway that ran past the heavily guarded tourist attraction in their back yard. He seized the clothing and darted towards the Manor.

"Eight," Lucius was saying as he reached the halfway mark. "NINE…"

Draco skidded to a halt at his father's feet and offered up the robes and crest, soaked in sweat. He felt a surge of inner disgust at himself for the bubbling, doglike eagerness to please that he felt for succeeding in saving his own ass.

"Ten," Lucius cooed, nostrils curling as he grabbed the clothes. His eyebrows jerked up and down scornfully. "Oh Good God, these smell like horse manure. Pass them onto a house elf on your way to the dining room, boy."

"Yes, father."

Lucius nodded with the sparest of approval, tossed the clothes back into his son's arms, and took Narcissa's hand. The three of them strolled into the Manor. Draco tried to muffle his heavy panting and wipe his face free of dirt and sweat. He found that long after they had sat down to their vast, lavish dinner of custom, his calves ached and he was short of breath. He was unable to focus on the use of the correct silverware for a considerable ten minutes after the main course was served.

His mother seemed strangely subdued; she always did after his father had played some little "game" with Draco. But she never SAID anything about it. And what made Draco angrier, more hurt, father's games themselves or mother's blind eye?

Lately, he was pretty sure it was the latter. He'd grown accustomed to the former.

And yet part of him liked it that she pretended nothing in life was wrong with their family—that she never EVER got angry at Lucius. It was easier to blame HIMSELF for their problems: That meant that any discord in Draco's most intimate of worlds could be personally CONTROLLED. Draco never felt like he was in control. So he CRAVED it, control: MADLY.

So where the hell did THAT leave him? Christ, how pathetic.

"Old Dolores Umbridge is going to get a shoe-in at the Ministry soon, I wager, and deal with the problem of the Half-Breeds," Lucius, at the head of the long mahogany table, was purring, while elegantly cutting his steak. TOTALLY unaware of his imprisonment of his two dining partners.

"Oh?" Narcissa's voice became painfully cordial. Her delicate nostrils curled. "I don't suppose it frightens you, then, dear husband, that she might discover your chummy relationship with Fenrir Greyback?" She stabbed her own steak, and dabbles of reddish juice sprayed the tablecloth.

Lucius cringed—visibly. Then his eyes grew colder still, were that possible. "Cissa, really…"

Draco seized a handful of cashews from the crystal tray at the edge of the table, and preyed upon them with loud chomping gulps. He had gained quite a taste for these nuts as every time this topic arose, whether at a party or while wedged stiflingly between mum and father, he had found that loudly crunching on the food somewhat muffled the ensuing discussions his parents had. Listening otherwise conjured the one and only memory of his mother being blazingly angry at his father. _Blazingly._

_He'd been…what, five? Yes, five years old. It had happened so fast. A man in robes that stank and were innumerably stained, with a voice like a poorly oiled door hinge, sat in the Manor's parlor, and Lucius and Draco were entertaining him while Narcissa, oddly, took her tea upstairs. Lucius got a Floo call from a coworker at the Ministry and told Draco to please play the new piece on the piano forte for Mr. Greyback. The "new piece" being something, of course, at his age, of the caliber of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star…." _

_Draco was at the piano bench in the middle of the interlude when he felt something hot on the back of his neck. Something wet trickled down it and he shivered, and turned around, and there was the visitor, his hand tightly around Draco's tiny pale wrist…. "Let's go outside and play, little boy," the man had cooed._

Draco had been too scared to argue. "Mummy…" 

_"Ohh, she won't be angry with us, I promise," the man leered. His eyes burned._

_"Oh, WON'T SHE?" Suddenly Narcissa was there—how had she KNOWN?—snaking in between her child and his predator, and with one staggering blow and a screech of "EXPELLIARMUS," blasted the hulking, misshapen visitor clear across the room. Her wand crackled and the hand holding it trembled. She was terrifying. "LUCIUS!" she bellowed, though why she needed Draco's father while herself so capable of fighting, the boy never did discern. _

_Draco had looked up at his mother's hands, the wand hand shaking, the free hand clawing him protectively against her leg, and saw that her fingernails were half-polished; clearly she had felt his distress upstairs and stopped midway through her private tea and manicure session to come investigate. _

_The devotion in it made the five-year-old Draco glad and anguished at the same time. _

Lucius had come tearing into the room, cast one look between Greyback and his family, and gone livid. "OUT! OUT OF MY HOUSE NOW!" he roared, literally chasing Greyback out the still-ajar front door.

_But the worst had come only after Greyback was gone, when his mother and father spent two solid hours screaming at each other about responsibility and sacrifice and children, and Narcissa had claimed Lucius made her "survival" at St. Mungo's null and void with his careless fathering. This had actually silenced Lucius, who had vanished upstairs into his study and not joined them for dinner that evening._

_The next day, everything had seemed the same between his parents, but Draco himself was forever changed. _

Thank God at the moment it seemed his mother was changing the subject. "Pansy Parkinson and her parents are home from Germany, Draco," she cooed, impeccably straightening out the—yes, silver and green—table linens that she had soiled. "It might be a nice gesture if you took her out stargazing on your Nimbus for an hour or two tonight. Then she and her parents could join us all for a cup of fine Hallow's Eve Pumpkin Tea. She is such a darling child, after all, you and she get along _so_ famously."

Draco fought hard for mild and polite interest, but he had never been quick enough to meld his gut reaction to another person's statements into a more diplomatic façade:

It was one bloody thing, one _USEFUL _thing, that he had of course NOT inherited from _either_ of his cucumber-cool parents. He was what his father disdainfully termed "enthusiastic" and his personal favorite, "gushy" ("Good Lord, Draco"—_even though Lucius believed in no such deity_—"with you, even coldness must be a blizzard, musn't it? We can't have just a bit of a chill, a snowflake, can we?"_ Politely sardonic laughter_.)

Draco felt his nostrils curling but tried to suppress his sneer of disgust; it was apparently an unsuccessful attempt, as Lucius was now threateningly glaring at him over his L-M engraved teacup.

Draco finally forced quite the sweet, innocent smile, widening his eyes as beautifully as he could. "Of….of course, mum."

His voice cracked and he winced; his parents and Pansy's had been scheming to get them married to move the dying lines of Purebloods along practically since their conception. They had even made complex genealogies to make certain that there were recessive gray-eyed blond genes in her family to ensure that their children be further duplicates of Draco and Lucius and thousands of Malfoy men before them. Draco imagined the hundreds of stuffy old asses lining the walls of Malfoy Manor and suddenly gagged into his teacup.

"And Griselda Marchbanks from the Wizarding Examinations Authority is coming over for dinner tomorrow….Darling, are you alright?" Narcissa asked idly, presenting a lack of interest in whether Draco was writhing on the floor bitten by a poisonous snake or just peachy. It was her obligatory façade; her eyes, a pale aqua to her husband and son's pewter, betrayed a concealed tenderness. She dropped her napkin then, leaned under the table and took advantage of the "mistake" to squeeze her son's long white-fingered hand. It was enough for Draco, whose gaze shifted across her face. He smiled timidly and made to speak.

"He's fine," Lucius supplied, as Draco's mouth uselessly opened and then promptly shut itself. "Son, we must continue cultivating your tolerance of fine liquor. Keep sipping." He removed his wand from the tip of his snake cane, faithfully beside his chair, and murmered, "_wingardium leviosa_," and Draco's barely-touched wine goblet flew to his lips from down the table.

Draco groaned; he'd already eaten too much and the rich table wine would not aid his digestive process. _Fookin' lightweight, _he heard Alexis Renard's best friend Haylin Daire half-jeer, half-tease him in his head, as Haylin had done many times at school with a bottle of filched firewhiskey. Father had not a clue how "cultivated" Draco's skill at liquor consumption was, and this merest of secrets kept from Lucius gave him a strange, unholy pleasure. He allowed himself a stupid little accidental laugh. Ungracefully, he spluttered on a bit of red wine.

Narcissa stared at him, frozen with quiet alarm. She folded her retrieved napkin several times in her lap, unnecessarily.

Lucius's lips thinned. "You think dinner etiquette amusing, son?" His voice was dangerously nonchalant.

"No, father," Draco replied, blandly. Carefully.

"Then what are you laughing about?"

"Well, as I was saying, about Griselda Marchbanks…." Narcissa interceded quickly. "I thought perhaps a light seafood dish, she used to live in Ireland and she loves fish…"

Lucius ignored her. "Well, son? Two impudent acts in the span of an hour, behind my back? And you've got no decent explanation for it?"

"I was just joking before, father…" Draco began lamely, twisting the Malfoy signet ring around on his finger. He fixed his gaze on his mother's beautiful fingernails; they were painted perfectly tonight.

But they were folded uselessly on the tabletop.

"JOKING?" It was always incredible how fast Lucius's voice changed from a dove croon to a snake hiss. And then, on very rare occasions, it graduated to a roar. "Joking about cherished heirlooms? Joking about the fact of our family's EXALTED STATUS!"

"No, no, father, I just meant…"

"Oh, DO enlighten us with your thirteen-year-old VASTNESS of wisdom, Draco," Lucius sneered, snapping to his feet. His eyes always seemed brighter and paler when he was angry; his irises were like the white-hot edge of a blacksmith's fire poker.

Draco didn't even need to look at his father to feel the hole being burned into his skull by that gaze, that very moment. Under the table, he ripped at a loose thread of his napkin. God, it was hot. Sweat was rolling down the back of his neck in that damned stuffy dining room. "No, I just…I…do you always have to say that stuff to me?" He wiped spasmodically at his forehead.

Lucius's throat made a gurgling sound. He rolled his eyes, stopping halfway round the table. His hand paused halfway in the direction of the snake cane that he always placed a few quelling feet to Draco's left during dinner. " 'Stuff?' Well, my goodness. What an enlightened vocabulary you sport, son. To precisely what 'STUFF' do you refer?" He bared his teeth in an angry leer.

"I mean you DON'T have to make fun of me, I get all FLUSTERED and forget what to SAY! To make you HAPPY and OFF MY ASS!" There, to hell with it. It was already too late and he felt so damned CORNERED. Oh God, so hot, he was going to sick up or pass out any minute….The room danced and hummed with nauseating richness….

Lucius blinked, a number of times, and slid a painfully slow glance towards Draco's mother. Narcissa was as pale as a corpse drifting belly-up in a river. She didn't move or speak. This was not a child-preying werewolf, no, it was far more terrifying: It was her own husband. One of those beautifully nailed hands was covering her mouth tightly. "_Lucius, please…."_ Two words squeezed out between her taut white fingers. Then a third: "_Don't."_

Draco regretted his moment of defiance immediately, for her sake; he hated her for it, too, somehow. And oh, Christ, the man looming over him now….

"No," his father hissed at his mother, while never removing a dark, appraising glare from Draco's form. "No, YOU make HIM apologize, Cissa." Something in that contemptuous mask cracked, for just an instant, and Draco had the oddest feeling that, in that instant, he had been the adult and his father the child: helpless with some kind distraught toddler's engulfing inner rage, craving guidance out of his immobilizing, tantrum-like fury. But then it passed and Lucius looked down at his only child with hate and disdain once more.

A very weak voice floated across the table. "Draco, tell your father you are sorry."

Draco's eyes narrowed. He remembered a time when he had looked at Potter that way, during a Quidditch match, and it had even unnerved Hogwarts's Golden Boy for a millisecond. Maybe it would work on his God and Guardian, too.

_DAD DAD DAD DAD DAD…he was thinking the forbidden word over and over in his head, sneer creases forming on his pale, angelic cheeks, around that pointy straight little nose…DAD DAD DAD DAD. HA!_

"No," he said out loud. Softly, but clearly.

Lucius shuddered with fury. "WHAT?" He demanded, with some sort of frenzied, exaggerated politeness. There was even some grotesque variant of a smile on his face, twisted as though his lips had been pumped full of venom.

"I said no."

"Get up. NOW."

Draco stood up. Still with his eyes narrow and glittering. Like his father's eyes. He did nothing more or less, setting his jaw.

Lucius seized his son's arm in one hand and the snake cane in the other, and dragged both out of the dining room. They passed Draco's mother, who sat shaking in her chair, face now buried in both beautiful hands.

The beaten path was trodden, down a narrow corridor, open a portrait of the first known historical Malfoy, through a hidden passageway (Draco's belly roiled whenever he smelled mildew or saw a cobweb, for it reminded him of this passageway—Weasley always derided him for his fear of Hogwarts's Forbidden Forest, but bugger, it smelled JUST LIKE this corridor…), finally up a narrow, serpentine stairway and into a secluded study.

God, it was quiet in there. And it stank of soot. Draco hated fireplaces, too.

"Go stand at my desk, and take off your shirt," Lucius breathed. He raised the snake cane high as Draco obeyed, peeling off the sweaty thing. The boy's skin was cold against the perspiration and it made him feel oddly tingly. And finally the fear set in and he started to quake as he bent over his father's work desk, hands stumbling over Owl post parchment and knocking over inkbottles as he braced himself.

And about then, the cane came down for the first blow—ordinarily on the hindquarters or back. Sometimes the arms, but nowhere visible when clothed. First blow was always the worst, because he was never sure where, out of the possible places, it would be. The rest were pretty tolerable.

_SMACK._

He thought of Susan Collins's dog Charlie, and how it licked his face and just approved of him point-blank. He wanted a dog.

_SMACK._

He thought of Susan and how she'd come sit with him all night in his dorm in the Dungeons while he threw up his guts with a stomach virus, and how she'd given him that funny Muggle drink, Sprite, and stroked his hair to soothe him to sleep, while his parents usually relegated such tasks at home to Blinky the house elf. He wanted a sister.

_SMACK._

He thought of Haylin Daire and how one night the misanthropic werewolf had come sit with him—yes, all night—in the owlery while Draco waited hopefully to intercept a Howler from his father, meant for the next morning's breakfast. He thought of how Haylin let him sit and cry very un-mannishly and pour out his confusion and stress and a newfound addiction to the Room of Requirement, which gave him mirages of what he needed for an hour or two. And he thought of how, at the end of it, Haylin teased him without one mention of his puffy red-rimmed eyes, and gave him goofy nicknames like "Pissant" and "Skittles, the NEW white rapper," and "the Sofa King of the land of We Todd Did." And made him laugh. Long and hard. He wanted a brother.

_SMACK._

He thought of Alexis and Margaret Renard's crazy mother Odile, and how she wrote them little notes from her padded cell and took all kinds of unpleasant awful medications to try and be there in both mind and body for them, who overcame herself for them, who loved them ceaselessly. He thought of his own mother, who let his father take him away and hurt him time and time again. He wanted a new mother.

_SMACK. _

He thought of goddamned Harry Potter and his PERFECT dead father the Gryffindor, the charming loving heroic Gryffindor, who sacrificed himself for his son in the most ultimate of ways. He thought of his own father who never even watched him play on his broom in their back yard. And oh Christ, oh Lord…He wanted a new father. And he wanted HIS father. And he wanted a new one. And he wanted HIS….Or he could just opt to want to be POTTER, He Whose Mistakes Were Forgiven, He Whose Victories Were Noted, with his wonderful dead dad. That would work, too….

Oh yes, the Malfoys. They "had it all," they did. Everyone wanted to be a Malfoy….

_Almost done now._

_Abraxus Malfoy had given his son Lucius the snake cane. Draco had seen black and white family photographs of his father and grandfather; Lucius had resembled a quieter, more slender-faced variant of himself at twelve. His father never told him anything about his childhood, but in the framed photograph in Lucius's study, every time Abraxus bent and plucked a wayward leaf out of Lucius's hair under the Cypress tree where they posed, his cane hand would twitch a bit, and Lucius would yank away, wide-eyed, before regaining composure and that same reserved, cool smile of his adulthood. Draco had asked about it once, when he was seven or eight, when Crabbe was over for a slumber party playing wizard's chess, and in the same moment a pawn had burst right at the level of Lucius's left hand, scalding it. Lucius had overturned their gameboard, scattering pieces everywhere, and roared at them to get the hell out of his study with their "toys." Crabbe had run out of the room sobbing. Draco never asked that question again. And when Abraxus died of Dragon Pox only a couple years later, the photograph suddenly vanished from the study and from the Manor entirely._

There was a little crack in the silver-encased glass of Lucius's study window. It had been there since Draco could remember, and somehow no one ever remembered to wand-flick a "_reparo"_ at it. It was probably too small for a cockroach to squeeze through. But he stared at it, every time his father said "bend over," he stared at it and, for some reason, sneered. It was the temptation of flight and freedom and so he sneered at it. _I don't need you, I am a Malfoy and I love it. I bloody LOVE it. _

_I am a Malfoy._

_I want to be ANYONE but a Malfoy._

_No, I am a Malfoy._

_I want to be a Malfoy._

_A Malfoy. _

_Malfoy. _

_I love it. _

_Ow, Christ God. That REALLY hurt. _

_But he doesn't do this regularly or anything, maybe once in several months…It's not some sick-ass thing like he shags me, or anything… God, I'm not a damned charity case…I'm not a shrink's fodder…._

_Wait, I'm supposed to be listening to what he's saying now. _

"You—do—not—exist—except—to—serve—my—wishes. You—exist—only—as—an—extension—of—ME." Lucius did not seem to be enjoying this. Never _entirely_. One might assume he was the type to derive sado-masochistic pleasure out of smacking and bruising his own child, but….Draco could never see enough evidence of that type-casting of the martyr and the tyrant to _totally _hate his father—the ambivalence of which made these "lessons" even more…_unbearable_, somehow. Lucius wasn't even looking at his son as he struck, but somewhere in the unpinpointed distance past his study's walls. In fact, often, as right that moment, Lucius looked as close to weeping as Draco could ever conceive. This was not to say he looked _remotely_ like he was going to REALLY CRY—no, it was just that…. his jaw sort of tightened, and his lips disappeared into a line and revealed bared teeth, and there was a particular vein on his forehead that always popped, and his eyebrows curled despairingly between that waterfall of white blond, and well…. His eyes went very glassy By about ten minutes into it, it always reminded Draco of the three days he'd had Dragon Pox, and when this thought struck him, Draco usually began to yelp and whimper, and lose himself to simpering sobs, and say he was sorry, over and over and _OVER_.

And Lucius would always say, "You _should_ be," or "you're forgiven _THIS_ time, Draco," and it would finally _STOP_.

June, the Order of the Phoenix, directly before Chapter 32 

_"Wicked seeds of desperation  
Who'd ever dream that this memory would come back  
Evil deeds that breed temptation  
I close my eyes but I cannot relax _

I can't assume to know his reasons  
I can't attempt to put a name upon his face  
Empty eyes I see the demon  
If I could I would leave this place

_Part of me doesn't even care  
Part of me wasn't even there _

Another wave to crash around me  
A pulling current that could bring me to my knees  
Where was I during the beating  
Separation of body mind and ...

Part of me doesn't even care  
Part of me wasn't even there

I can still see his face  
The lines upon his face  
And if could erase the hate  
That breeds this nightmare  
And how was I to know  
A child of twelve years old  
A hollow seed  
But I can be  
Whatever I...  
Want to be.

Part of me doesn't even care  
Part of me wasn't even there"

_--Vonray_

Margaret Renard was being led around the Great Hall by Draco Malfoy…or at least he looked vaguely like the boy she'd known: If the boy she'd known had been starved and utterly deprived of natural sunlight. He was carrying her suitcase for her, because she was going to get on the Hogwarts Express a couple weeks early, and meet her father at an earlier junction before London. With help from Haylin Daire and Remus Lupin, Victor and Alexis had joined the Order of the Phoenix and were in the process of moving their possessions in France, as well as Odile, to an Unplottable position in central England. It was much to adjust to, and she was told to reveal none of it to Draco.

Of course, Draco had discovered their affiliation at the beginning of the year, and had, most quiet and heartbroken, without tantrum or cruel retaliation, simply told Alexis, Haylin, and Susan Collins that he could no longer speak to them. It had not been their affiliation itself: It had been the fact that they had never had enough faith in him to TELL him they were in the Order, to believe he would never betray them. It was not the first time he'd felt them breech his trust, but it was definitely the last time.

Still, he had maintained a friendship with Margaret (she did not tell him that she was gaining the qualities of a Seer and that sometimes when he touched her she saw strange vague visions, like hollow shells, green skulls, dark narrow hallways, silver snake heads, an eerie white hot blade etching the dark mark on an adolescent's forearm…black robed figures choking a white-blond haired boy…she did not tell Draco she had told her brother and his associates in the Order about these visions of the Malfoys….) and so here he was, gesturing with a free hand and holding forth with an aggressive energy that, lately, fairly fatigued her.

He was talking at her about his mother again, and about his suddenly pressing full fledged manhood—how he was to bring home the bacon now. He never mentioned the scandal surrounding his father's break in to the Ministry in the company of Death Eaters, his attempted murder of the boy Harry Potter, or his current imprisonment in Azkaban as a result….but it was common knowledge now, and it made him eager to steel himself in a fragile façade of maturity and strength.

And spite.

And bullying.

Quickness to outshine everyone. Quickness to hate his foes before they could hate him more competently and fully.

"Weasley is Our King" rang in Margaret's ears night and day, long after the Gyrffindors had changed the tune into something triumphal and harmless. It became a near-legendary gossip topic that Draco and Harry Potter had nearly hexed each other to death in a lone corridor of the school. The most lurid, and thus rampant, rumor of this near-showdown was that Draco had delivered a death threat to Harry. A legitimate death threat.

Margaret hated all of it. She looked down at Draco's gawky, pale legs now, as he chattered; a recent growth spurt made his calves appear stretched out from under a pair of green Quidditch uniform shorts like raw pretzel dough. His knees and ankles were dotted with scabs and mosquito bites and it reminded her of the night the two of them had chased fireflies and run in the sprinklers on the lawn behind Susan's aunt's townhouse one summer not so long ago. And another summer, when he had given her a broom ride for her eleventh birthday, there had been fireflies with them then, too, and Haylin and Renard had renamed a star after her and Draco had pointed it out to her while they were aloft, laughing so boyishly as he gestured at the blazing jewels above them…

Draco had accidentally squished a firefly in his palm that night, in his desperate eagerness to catch it and to please her. She had cried, not as much for the firefly as for what it represented. She had cried and clung to him till they had landed, and he had carried her to her guest bed where she had fallen asleep still clinging to his Gladrags designer shirt. She had been 11 and he just barely 14.

Margaret was going on 13 now, very young for a third year at Hogwarts, but even at her age, she was pretty sure that Draco Malfoy was STILL just a boy.

His interpretation, however….

"…of course I'll be quite occupied running errands and business transactions, and maintaining the Manor for mother….that's my job now, you know. I'm told I'm to be head of the house, see to mother's needs, watch out for her and all, while father is….away. I figure I can manage, I'm no baby anymore .…Well! Got some larks planned for your summer, I bet. Whatever you do, it'll be fun for your girlfriends and mates, Maggie, sweetheart. You know what, take fifty points to Hufflepuff just because I luv ya. Slytherin will still be in the lead, after all, what with Umbridge around." Even though something about his voice strained awkwardly on the word "love," Draco grinned.

No. He _sneered_. Margaret realized she hadn't seen him genuinely smile since the end of his fourth and her second year. Something had happened over that summer one year past, after the death of Cedric Diggory….actually, he had changed FAR before then…he had changed the night the Death Eaters had reformed their ranks, and had tormented a local Muggle and his wife and infant child the evening after Ireland had won the World Cup. Much had happened that night…

Draco had gone on to his parents' tent alone….The pandemonium had severed the remaining members of their group—Renard, Haylin, Susan, and she, Margaret—in half, the girls left to their own devices, fleeing the jeering pack of ravenous black-hooded, white-masked wolves that were the Death Eaters, and their veil of sickly green light as they taunted the Muggle family….Draco had found them first, leaning against a great willow tree, had torn himself from a nasty argument with a crowd of Hogwarts students, among them a boy with glasses and black hair—someone told her later he had been Harry Potter—and a bushy brown haired girl, and there was a fear in Draco's eyes Margaret had never seen, a fervency as he beheld Susan in particular …The Dark Mark blazing in the sky…the whimpering of a female house elf rushing past….Draco's breathing growing shallow and rapid and vaporous in the chill night like the dragon "haaahhh's" they had joked about in the snow when Margaret had been ten…. Draco and his misleadingly angelic face, angelic even in the dark, twisted now with some kind of strange, frenzied guilt… "My GOD, Susan, Maggie, what are you DOING here? Run, just RUN…" Susan kissing him on the pale clammy cheek… Fleeing…and not looking back at him…cornered in a forest clearing by two Death Eaters….Renard and Haylin finding them….

A Cruciatus cast on Renard by the Death Eater on the right, because Renard had hesitated to fight, because Renard's mother in St. Mungo's had taught him never to act on the offensive, and so Renard always overestimated the kindness of others….Haylin erupting, Haylin attacking the Death Eater on the right, crucioing the one on the left….Renard gasping for breath, sitting up, cold and sweaty….All of them staring at the one on the right who went far too still….Silence…

And then Haylin had gone to the flat of Remus Lupin, another werewolf, who was as close to a father as he had, and lain there in his bathtub in shock, and spent the days to follow alternately near tears and completely numb—staring at the paint peeling off the corner of Lupin's guest bedroom.

And they had all KEPT it from Draco, everything that happened after he had seen Susan and Margaret. But Draco had found out through Ragan, the Slytherin son of the murdered Death Eater. As the school year of the Triwizard Tournament began, Ragan had tried to harass Haylin in the halls with his gang, scraping his sides with bits of scrap metal and rocks from the lakeside….Draco had resisted participating in the hazing. Stoutly. And been thanked by having been the last to find out what the others suffered that night at the World Cup. He never got over what he saw to be a tremendous breech of trust, a betrayal. And it was the first time he'd had to choose between his friends and the ideals of his fanatical Pureblooded family and Hogwarts House. The strain of it was just the beginning, and ….well…

It had made everything about Draco like a beautiful melody on violins with some single unlocated string out of tune.

Draco's words of the present sunk in, and Margaret drew an indignant breath. "Draco, you cannot give me points like that!"

_Sneer_. "Watch me, honey." The bored, airy gaze of the Slytherin Prince ascended upon the hourglasses above them, the hourglasses keeping minute-by-minute record of House Cup points, and within an instant sand was pouring into the Hufflepuff glass. "Ha," Draco barked, above the howls of protest ensuing from the ill-disciplined first years in Gryffindor and Ravenclaw. He flashed Margaret another triumphant leer. "_This_ is the life, eh? Want a couple more for kicks?"

"_NO!_ I want you to get rid of the 50 you just gave me! I didn't EARN those!" She said it softly, between her teeth, but her face must have been livid, because he momentarily wilted.

"Aw, Maggie, come on…I'm sure you 'earned' it in finals this week…"

"No, please… Draco, what would Lexi and Haylin say? What would SUSAN say? Please, Draco, it was very nice of you, but I…"

The crushed and chagrined look on Draco's face rapidly evaporated, and a hot flush of scorn and the resentment of being spurned glittered in his eyes. Such huge, _cruel _gray eyes, a very watchful predator's. "Well, _Margaret_, being as they all graduated, and Susan won't TALK to me anymore, who gives a flying—"

"Draco, please!" Her voice rose too, but high, shrill, battling tears. "Susan won't talk to you because you called her _THAT WORD_ out by the lake last week when she was visiting, to make Pansy Parkinson happy— "

Draco's voice withdrew to a realm of raspy quietude. It was like the scratch of a rat's claws on hardwood floors. "Oh, so now _you're_ too good for me, _too?_ Even though I don't hate you for being a Blood Traitor, you think I'm nothing, too? You're getting all sanctimonious and soft on the Mudbloods…"

"I might be," she replied, softly, evenly, as they sat down together at the Slytherin table. "I never saw any difference between blood types. And don't say that word. I hate it."

He bared his straight, impeccable white fangs; his pupils dilated in rage like his father's. The bridge of his nose curled into a disgusted snarl like his mother's. "_Mud….blooooood_," the word came out acidly and slowly. "_Dirrrrt…veeeeeinnss_. See? Nothing happened. The world didn't explode, Margaret."

"But something will happen. Someday. Something REALLY AWFUL will happen if you keep acting this way. THINKING this way. Hating people, stuffing them into these big groups of..of…clichés and overgeneralizations…"

"Mudbloooood, Mudblooood. Lalalaaaaaaa. OOOooo. Ickle Maggie scared, is she? Don't be scared, Maggie."

Something about the way he lay his hand, with that damned Malfoy signet ring, over hers, the patronizing, laughing, belittling way his lips curled into yet another smirk, the air of ridiculous strutting authority about the way he cocked that white-blond head at her—God, his stupid IDLE CURIOSITY about his own bigotry, like it was all some great mischievous _child's GAME_—made something small but profound inside her erupt. Her whiskey-brown eyes blazed. "Stop treating me the way you did when I was ten. You think I don't know what's at stake here? You think I don't see what is happening? Are you STUPID, Draco, or just _THAT MEAN_?"

"Nothing is happening." His voice was taut, but he fought for casual calm. "Christ, Margaret. Nothing that I can't handle, okay! MUUUD…BLOOOOOOOD. See? Everyone's STILL HERE." He gestured around at his table, where Pansy, to his right, sat insufferably giggling to her brood about some mousy Muggle-born first year hurrying past—a Hufflepuff, Margaret noticed—then at the Great Hall, and the seat where a horrid toadlike woman sat grinning widely and sadistically sweetly back.

And Margaret realized she _hated_ Draco.

Her French accent thickened with her lack of composure as she attacked him, a lunge for the emotional jugular, for the first and last time in her life. "That's your stupid _father's_ word. Your father isn't going to EVER like you any _BETTER_ just because you say all his dirty words. He'll just treat you the _SAME_. He doesn't know HOW to….! You know what, your father isn't EVER going to LIKE you—PERIOD. _You are better than him anyway_, so why are you DOING all this?"

And she felt herself standing and walking towards the doors.

He stood up in the middle of the Great Hall then, shot up like a blond-white ice bottlerocket. His fists formed taut claws at his sides. His voice was strangely subdued while paired with the apoplectic tics and snarls contorting his otherwise angelically unmarred face. Oh yes, he was a Malfoy: He even pitched fits exquisitely. _Regally._ "They should _die_." His 15-year-old voice quivered and broke into a hoarse sort of squeak. He trembled; it made the silver light of his prefect badge and Inquisitorial Squad "I" quiver like strange, cold tongues of flame just below his heart. "You understand, Margaret? I want them to die. And so should YOU."

"I…I don't want _anyone_ to die…Who are you talking about?" Margaret was rooted to the spot. She wished she still had her glasses, so she could have something to take off and polish and pretend was distracting her every fiber of attention. But she was stuck now, gawking at her friend, her big brother's friend, as he became a demon.

She felt the whole Hall looking at them; they were the only two individuals stoically standing instead of seated and happily chattering about the close of final exams. She hated how she was pigeon toed and how her hair was curly and a garish dark frizzy red, and how her French accent was so sharp. She felt stupid and it made her even more indignant and horrified as she awaited his reply. She had too much pride for this strange and cruel warfare between people shy of 18 years of age. Was this kind of discord how her mother had finally lost her mind…?

"MUGGLES, that's who!" Suddenly Draco was blaring like an ill tuned trumpet; suddenly he had chosen to answer her, and violently. His pupils dilated bestially, the eyes of a cornered stray dog or rodent baring its fangs. "MUDBLOODS! SEE? I SAID IT _AGAIN_! YOU'RE RIGHT! THINGS _WILL_ HAPPEN NOW! They should _ALL DIE_! MUDBLOOD LOVERS and BLOOD TRAITORS put my FATHER in PRISON!"

_Stop._

"You remember your _PRECIOUS_ HAYLIN DAIRE, your brother's BEST FRIEND?"

_Oh God, Draco, stop._

" HIS 'BRO'? NOT LIKE I COULD EVER HAVE BEEN HIS 'BRO,' RIGHT? I could never be trusted worth skrewt droppings_, right_? WELL _HE KILLED,_ REMEMBER? REMEMBER RAGAN'S DAD? REMEMBER THE NIGHT AFTER THE WORLD CUP? When Haylin saw the DEATH EATERS? What he DID when Ragan's dad took off his mask and CAME AT YOU? YOU STILL LOVE _HIM_, THE _MUDBLOOD LOVER_! You know _HE understands that killing's GOT to come next!"_

The room collectively gasped, except for the Slytherin table, which roiled with snickers. Apparently even their own christened leader was not above their derision.

"...Draco..." Now Margaret felt the solid ground underneath her turning to electrically crackling air. Her toes were numb and the room reeled giddily. The most nauseating and awful vertigo...Who WAS this person writhing with such contempt in front of her? Where was the laughably haughty boy who pretended his loud arrogance to hide his insecurity and hurt, whose skinny chest had been her pillow when her brother Alexis had accompanied Haylin Daire out on his full moon trips to the Shrieking Shack, when she had otherwise been taunted by insomnia? Who was this vindictive….? "I told you, stop! That's a HORRIBLE word. It means hate and dirt and I CAN'T hear you saying it...and..and there are so many GOOD Muggles! "

"Margaret, how COULD YOU! There ARE NOT! THINK! Be _MY FRIEND_! _MINE!"_ He shrieked it, greedily, covetous of her loyalties and love, demanding some pact; the purple circles always faintly present under his eyes dug seemingly darker, the blue veins against his pale skin pulsing. His eyes glittered with a rainstorm-gray malevolence that staggered her. "You're a _PUREBLOOD TOO_, think! ALL of them are FILTH! _Let's both HATE THEM_! NOW, Margaret!"

"What about SUSAN? What about Haylin's girlfriend? You LOVE her, she kissed your cheek and gave you ointment for you cut-up knees after….after Quidditch! She held your hair when you THREW UP, Draco!" Margaret flung desperately back, tears making her voice thick. "YOU LOVE HER, Draco!"

"I SAID ALL OF THEM!" Draco roared. He clutched and clawed for some certainty, even if it was certainty of something monstrous. It took the last scrap of composure Margaret had to see how very desperate he looked. "AND I MEANT ALL OF THEM! YOU SAY IT NOW TOO! NOW, MARGARET, SAY IT! GOD, COME ON! YOU HAVE TO, YOU MUST! YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND, YOU MUST! SAY IT, SAY IT NOW: 'MUDBLOODS ARE FILTHY SONS AND DAUGHTERS OF ANIM- - '"

He got no further, because Margaret, benevolent Margaret, his little tagalong who had prank-braided his precious silver blond hair in his sleep one summer slumber party, his little Margaret Renard, walked up to him and slapped him across the cheek.

Hard.

So hard that his head reeled and spittle flew from his pretty little oval jaw.

The minute she'd done it, Margaret burst into silent, gulping, gasping tears. Her palm stung.

Draco's face seared not its usual milky peach-pink, but a bright blood red. He was stripped, at once, of his rage, his ferocity, his dignity, and his intolerable power. The hand print on his cheek proved that. And so did the tears that flooded his eyes till they were as bright and mournful as hers. He set his jaw and tried very hard to look like his father. Failing, of course. "…._Maggie_?"

Even the Slytherin table had gone mute now. The sixth and seventh years and the other prefects besides Draco resumed uncomfortable murmers, drawing sidelong glances, low chattering, and elbow probes from the rest of the student body, as the young witch and wizard stared each other down in tears, and went rigid, and resisted the urge to wipe their running wet noses or blink…

And both realized, right that moment, that they had aged decades in a few minutes.

Margaret found her voice first. "You know what? With your silly little anti-Dumbledore club? With all the awful things it stands for? You've just started a civil war between US, too, Draco. Because I just can't believe those things you were screaming at me to believe. I CAN'T. Not for all the love I have for you in this WHOLE WORLD." Suddenly she could not see him, she could not see his reaction, because tears drizzled down her cheeks unstoppably now. "I think you've picked your path now. I hope it makes you happy."

And then she turned and ran and ran and ran from him and from growing up and from realizing that a friend can be so devastatingly disappointing.

Draco didn't follow her. He knew.

A month later, Lord Voldemort visited Wiltshire, materializing in the central sitting room of Malfoy Manor, and delivered a call to arms, a role in a crusade (a dirty vengeful ultimatum), to the trembling, 16-year-old only child of Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy. He performed legilimency and yanked out the memory of Lucius's three days of Dragon Pox. A slow, curling sneer slithered up his lips while Draco squirmed on the parlor sofa, staunchly evading his mothers's attempts to clasp his trembling hand in hers. The Dark Lord's red slitted eyes bore into the boy. Did Draco really love his father that much?

Yes, Draco did.

His father who beat and spat on him? Who was himself a failure?

Yes, Draco did.

How sickening. How very pathetic and weak. The Dark Lord had once thought better of his faithful Malfoys.

No response.

Well, fathers were worthless filth who denied their sons' cries to notice their existence. This father was just like any other father, and he had disappointed his Master—severely. He had lost the Prophecy. He deserved to die. So did his wife who enabled such insufficiency. The Dark Lord wanted their deaths right now, and very badly. And what did the child have to say to THAT!

Draco stammered a protest. His f-f-f-f-father was none of these th-th-th-things!

Oh, stupid, cowardly child who sounded like Quirrell, another failure! Did he have what his father did not? Could he spare his parents's worthless lives by making up for their inadequate service to the Dark Lord?

Yes, Draco could try. Yes, please, Master, he could try. Please, Master, please….

Then was the child willing to swear allegiance to One Master Alone? Was he willing to atone for his father's sins? Was he willing to undertake the most important mission for the Dark Side yet conceived?

Yes, Draco was.

For his father who ….hmm….never lifted him up on his shoulders and watched fireflies with him? Who never watched him ride his broom? Who never went out on the Quidditch pitch when his child fell OFF the same broom mid-match—but instead, rolled his eyes disgustedly in the bleachers?

Yes.

His father whose hands gave him the scars that criss-crossed the skin of his shoulderblades and spine—at the slightest provocation?

Yes.

….Interesting. His father whose emotional distance drove his mother to a suicide attempt when the boy was two years old?

…Yes.

All to atone for his father, and thus indeed, to please the Dark Lord, Draco was willing to complete The Task?

Yes, Draco was. Anything to prove he could be Something Great. Anything for father and mother. Draco could do anything for them. He HAD to.

Very good. Then behold The Task, to be completed within the time frame of the next school year.

Tom Marlvolo Riddle changed his name to Lord Voldemort, but it was still a chaotic and desperate bastard offspring of his father's name. Draco Abraxus Malfoy thrashed through his childhood for identity and purpose, for self-worth, and yet for all his efforts, he was still blinded by his father's shadow.

Do you see a pattern emerging?

**_The Christmas before the Goblet of Fire_**

_"They painted up your secrets_

_With the lies they told to you_

_And the least they ever gave you_

_Was the most you ever knew_

_And I wonder where these dreams go_

_When the world gets in your way_

_What's the point in all this screaming?_

_No one's listening anyway…._

_They press their lips against you_

_And you love the lies they say_

_And I tried so hard to reach you_

_But you're falling anyway_

_And you know I see right through you_

_Cause the world got in your way_

_What's the point in all this screaming?_

_You're not listening anyway."_

_--The Goo Goo Dolls_

Odile Renard sat in the farthest private padded cell of St. Mungo's making her experimental Healer's potions. The white floor was scattered with brilliant colors and textures of various herbs and blooms as she brewed. Her heart was lighter and her mind clearer than they had been in many months. It was Christmas time and she had been released from the hospital for excellent progress; her family was arriving any moment to take her home.

In the middle of crushing a modest red flower between her fingers and mixing it into a small vat of lemon-scented warm water, she heard a sound at the door and looked up, expecting either an orderly or one of her children, and instead beheld Lucius Malfoy. He was wearing his long dried-blood-red robes and black serpent-detailed overcoat of custom, and his silver blond waterfall of hair hung sleekly about his coolly composed face. "Hello," was all he said, raising a supercilious eyebrow, as though she, rather than he, were the unexpected intruder. He didn't move any closer.

Odile stared back, thunderstruck.

At Malfoy's heel was a blustery looking old man in a pinstripe suit, who, it seemed, was leading a group of wealthy and formidable-looking visitors going on down the hall and out of the vicinity. The man murmured something in his ear, glancing almost fearfully at Odile, and Lucius shook his head once, impatiently, muttered, "I doubt it, Cornelius," and made a "shoo"-ing motion. The short, vague looking fellow in pinstripes nodded in bewilderment—an expression that rather suited him—and stumbled off.

Odile's lips twitched. She nodded in return, sinking into one of two white hospital chairs in her room. "Come sit, Lucius," she said. She folded her hands in her lap dignifiedly, as if this were her office and not a padded cell for the insane. She did not ask why he was here—not yet.

Malfoy obeyed, apparently utterly taken by her front. Like an interviewee for a prestigious position at a corporation or firm, he sat, crossed one leg over the other, restlessly uncrossed them, and finally leaned forward, hands clasped in a gesture that mirrored her own. His posture was impeccably straight, which could not possibly be comfortable, though on an individual like him, it might be natural. Still, if she knew no better, she might have thought him very ill at ease.

"I am here," Lucius fairly croaked, working, she could tell, for his usual bored drawl, "with the Minister of Magic and his colleagues, being wheedled into donating a sum of my private income to St.Mungo's—a department of my choice. As I really haven't made up my mind yet, and they are becoming tiresome with their clinging and flattery, I saw your name on the door of this room and decided to escape." The faintest of smirks formed on his smooth, pale features; apparently he thought he had cracked a joke. He twisted the head of his snake cane in a circular motion, watching her over its tip.

Odile grinned appreciatively at him, and Lucius leaned back just slightly in his chair, his breathing a bit more even. She inclined her head towards him. "I am glad to hear that I am still considered a comforting presence to a dear old schoolmate."

Lucius stared the former illustrious Mediwitch up and down and then nodded, once. "Yes," he said, simply.

She got the oddest feeling he was waiting for HER to continue breeding conversation, and eventually casually trip across the subject of his visit, even though it was clear as crystal that he had something very specific and very urgent on his mind; there was no real reason why Lucius Malfoy needn't dismiss Cornelius Fudge and his associates, with his political and financial clout, and simply tell them he would Floo call his fiscal decision to the office on Monday.

So Odile kept talking, and resumed the crushing of red flowers into her little potions vat. "Victor and Alexis are coming to bring me home for the holidays. And where is Draco? He is such a darling boy; school is out, so I would have expected to see him trailing you just about everywhere. He does admire you so, and he has gotten very chummy with my little Margaret, who should be coming here today, too…."

Lucius's posture stiffened again. His eyes widened slightly. Oh, alors. BINGO. "He will be staying at the school for the holidays."

"Oh. Well…..is that HIS choice?"

Lucius hesitated. Then, very slowly, very carefully, he took Odile's hand.

She smiled.

His face twitched.

"What is the matter, Lucius?"

His throat closed. He spoke in a carefully cool, dry tone. But the words…"I….think I've failed. What you showed me when Draco was two. When Narcissa…I think I've performed poorly at it since then. What maddens me is your son seems better for the wear even though you are locked up in a padded cell. How the bloody hell is that?"

She barked a laugh, instantaneously, causing his hand to snap away from hers. "'_Maddens,_' eh? No pun intended?"

Lucius's lip curled suddenly, as if he realized how foolish he had been to try and discuss this matter with a woman long lost to insanity. A deep crease formed between his eyebrows. "Good Lord. Never mind." He made to stand, and quickly.

She seized his hand back into hers. She peeled off his back glove, staring at him unblinkingly. Lucius squirmed, but there was a nurse just outside the door, and it would be very obvious indeed who would be the one causing Odile distress if he upset her by resisting her touch.

Then his long-ago schoolmate and his wife's once-savior shoved something into his hands. A strange flower he'd never seen before—one of the red ones she was grinding into her potion. "Wood sorrel. It means joy. A mother's tenderness. A parent's affection. See how it stays bright and thriving? Even now?"

He watched her, eyes narrow and alarmed. It became suddenly quite clear how lucid Odile Renard still, on rare occasions, could be. "What?"

"Try, Lucius." She spoke again, and it was almost like an order. "Keep trying for him. Your son will know it if you are _trying_. My Lexi is 'better for the wear' because he knows that I try with all my heart, when I can, when I am awake and ….present. That, even more importantly, trying for him is the most important thing in the world to me. He doesn't care if St. Mungo's calls me crazy. He knows I would die for him."

Lucius Malfoy's face was feral. For a moment there was only the sound of patients humming lonely carols out in the corridor, and the crinkling of tinsel as a mediwitch's assistant decorated a plastic Christmas tree nearby. Then he spoke. "You have NO right to say that to me. NONE." His fingers went rigid in her grasp. He attempted imperial sangfroid. It looked more like he was slightly constipated.

"Oh, but I do. Draco will be living in the same world as my two children when he becomes a man. What you are doing _right now_ affects all three of them, and, thus, _me_."

"You want to talk herbs and flowers?" His lips went thin and white. His voice never once rose above a soft hiss. "Let's do it in alphabetical order, then. Oh, Severus Snape and I swap potion stories all the time, you see. Abatina: fickleness. Agnus castus: coldness. Basil: hatred. Creeping cereus: horror. Cypress: Death. Despair. Mourning. MY father, Abraxus, taught ME these things, and it takes EVERY OUNCE of resolve I HAVE not to thrust them down on MY son. Do you understand that? You think it stops with the children of TODAY, Odile? It goes back for EONS. There's no point: Your damned wood sorrel is going to wilt, just like MINE did. Get the bloody hell OFF me." Savagely, he tore his hand free of hers. And then he stood there staring at her again, the same helplessness he'd exhibited eleven years ago to her when she was not a patient, but a Healer, in St. Mungo's.

"My father tried to kill me when I was ten," Odile admitted into the silence. She spoke very calmly, with the clarity of a surgeon. The only evidence of her instability was the way in which she sporadically flicked her wrists at her sides, as though perpetually unscrewing very stubborn bottle caps. "He thought a Dark Wizard had possessed my body. He used to creep the halls of the mansion of my childhood muttering to the portraits of my ancestors about how my mother and I were conspiring to control him with the Imperius Curse, to frame him for something and land him in Azkaban. They took him here—to a cell very near my own—a week later. Believe me, he was adept at teaching the lessons you say you learned. You are not the only child of abuse in this world, old friend."

Lucius's jaw tensed. He watched Odile's flicking hands as though fascinated. His cheeks gained uncharacteristic ruddiness, and he did not speak.

"Happy Christmas, Lucius," Odile breathed. Her eyes were as un-patronizingly, stunningly kind, as tender, as they had been that night when his wife had been on the brink of self-imposed death. Alexis Renard's mother sat in her white hospital shift with food stains down the front, with her disheveled hair, and still, though Draco Malfoy's father stood over her, perfectly groomed and imperial and authoritarian, SHE reigned.

He ground his teeth till they ached. His nostrils flared. He suddenly hated her. "Happy Christmas." He turned sharply on his heel and left the room. He neither acknowledged Alexis and Margaret Renard's furtive greetings nor Victor Renard's scathing glare as he passed them in the hall. But he did see a small bouquet of wood sorrel and forget-me-nots in both children's hands, while their father dragged along their mother's still-empty suitcase.

And Lucius Malfoy, with his crisp, arrogant strides, reached the front desk, and the same dyed blonde Welcoming Witch of eleven years ago sat there, blinking benignly, perplexedly, at him through her thick bifocals.

There was no way she could have discerned the feeling in his chest somewhat akin to a swarming hornet's nest. Enough stings, enough standing there gawking at her, enough staring at the one little bloom of wood sorrel that the little girl, Margaret, had accidentally dropped by his foot, and suddenly a fierce impulse seized the lord of Malfoy Manor. He whetted his lips, and opened his mouth to try and speak.

Nothing.

He tried again.

Nothing.

Finally he cleared his throat, and the Welcoming Witch smiled broadly and leaned forward, pressing her hearing trumpet to her ear as Lucius pledged, "Cornelius Fudge will be in touch with you sometime this summer about a considerable sum of galleons that will be forwarded to THIS particular wing of St. Mungo's…in my name. Is that clear?"

The old lady's eyes bugged like those of a pug dog. "Oh….oh gracious ME, sir, what generosity, Mr….?"

"Malfoy."

"Mr. Malfoy, very well! Happy Christmas to you, sir!"

Lucius Malfoy did not answer, but instead clutched tightly to his snake cane, continuing to the entryway of St. Mungo's. The fallen wood sorrel bloom was directly in his path. He sucked in his cheekbones, and neither picked it up nor trampled it.

He stepped over it, and kept walking.

**The summer before the Goblet of Fire**

_Hey, Shite-head! Ha, WITHDRAWN, right? Learning my snarkiness from the best, you know, so do take a bow…Don't worry, I'll see you guys soon. I figured out a way to lie to my father—I bribed Crabbe into saying I went with him and his cousins to Europe for a Young Wizard World Tour, so I'll be Flooing to Haylin's flat in London next week, to spend the summer with you lot! He said we might Floo…well you buggers can Apparate, being over 18 now, and all (BAH, I HATE you both! )… to New York City, is that true! Wicked, mate! Well, see you there…. _

_Oh, Renard…about that last bit of your owl post. I had a dream last night, too.And I don't know who else to tell about it, besides you and Daire.So you can tell him if you like. God, I'm freaked. __It was that tree again. Bloody hell, you know, the one from the dream you had the other night. With the red roiling sky and all. Except it was more like it was sunset, but the sun was setting really fast—like, in five damn seconds, mate, and then it all went inky. I mean I couldn't see my HANDS. I was at the base of the tree….I think it was either a cypress or a weeping willow, or….sorta both. I was standing there all calm, I don't know why I was so CALM because I knew something AWFUL was coming for me, and someone was laughing at one side of my head and someone was crying at the other side. And I tried to laugh and then I tried to cry and I couldn't do either. And then all these men without faces came up to me and put this mirror in front of me, and I looked into it and…mate, there was NOTHING THERE. It was like I DIDN'T EXIST. And then there was this big white mask there, and it was on my face and..._

_Um, let's see…they started pushing me back into this black lake, these faceless people, and I couldn't laugh or cry still, and I couldn't talk, and I saw you coming for me, and I turned around and Susan was there behind me, in the water, and she was the person laughing and saying 'come on you can do it, Draco, swim to me,' and I was trying to tell her to swim away to shore but I couldn't talk still…_

_And Maggie was on the shore and she was the one crying and pointing at ME and I ..._

_Susan started SINKING and she wasn't laughing anymore but those PEOPLE were and then YOU were trying to save ME, you and Haylin, and I was trying to tell you to go after Susan instead, but I COULDN'T TALK..._

_Haylin had to come get you..and he tried to come for me but he couldn't reach me and then one of the men got a face and he was my… _

_Well, I forget who he was. _

_He pushed me on under with__his__foot...and he said 'stop breathing, Draco. Stop struggling.' And then I woke up._**_  
_**_Okay, truth?I suppose I'm a little scared these days, Renard. Do you ever feel as if you've been under the Imperius for years and years? And now you've woken and you feel weird and aimless? You know? And sort of wish you were back under it? Well that sounds stupid, doesn't it? But I do sometimes. Don't tell anyone I said that, it sounds childish... _

_Damn, you know, I couldn't see a thing. Oh I said that already. Sorry if this post seems all disconnected and sorry for smudges, I wrote it in different sittings. Father would shite himself if he saw me writing about Muggles…Damnit, speak of the devil…_

_FINALLY, he left for work, I can FINISH this! Okay, tell your mum I said thanks for those funny red flower seeds she sent me. I stink at Herbology and all, but hell, it was nice of her. She's a sweet old girl, really. Okay sorry, I wrote waaaay too much, didn't I? Cheerio, mate!_

_--D.M._

Hell on earth. Hell in the heads of thousands of children who see no choice and no way out of a daily war. Grieve for them, they're at the mercy of that which is "adult"…..So that a ratty bouquet of red wood sorrel can be their hope and their world, and a daylong case of Dragon Pox can be their hell. Hell on earth.

_"I haven't got any options!" said Malfoy, and suddenly he was as white as Dumbledore. "I've got to do it! He'll kill me! He'll kill my whole family!"_

_"I appreciate the difficulty of your position," said Dumbledore… "I can help you, Draco."_

_"No, you can't," said Malfoy, his wand hand shaking very badly indeed. "Nobody can. He told me to do it or he'll kill me. I've got no choice."_

_--from Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, by J.K.Rowling_

**_July, the summer before The Half-Blood Prince_**

"You look…ill, father."

"It seems Dementors don't distinguish between ordinary wizards and cherished old allies here, son. Of course, they seem to be filtering out of here these days for still wiser allies, so I rather suppose it could be worse."

"Are y—?"

"I am well enough. I am alive, aren't I?"

"Well. I just thought that…"

"Stupid boy."

_"Come over to the right side, Draco, and we can hide you more completely than you can possibly imagine….your mother….your father….we can protect him too. Come over to the right side, Draco. You are NOT a killer."_

…_Malfoy did not speak. His mouth was open, his wand hand still trembling. Harry thought he saw it drop by a fraction…._

_--from Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, by J.K.Rowling_

"I won't ever disappoint you, father."

"You already have, Draco. Stop saying that. Christ, you say that once a bloody week, don't you? Where on earth did you GET that foolishness?"

"No, please…I came to tell you something…something to rejoice about…no Dementor will be able to get to you then, dad—"

"FATHER."

"Father, sorry. But LISTEN, please—"

"And what are you doing here? Azkaban is no place for a CHILD. Not even for this short interview. Go home and send me an owl post."

"I'm NOT a child! LISTEN! The Dark Lord has visited me, father. I can preserve our family's glory. Our treasured heritage, like you always said. I didn't forget the Mudbloods at Stonehenge. You will see, father. Mother is trying to talk me out of it, Snape's on my back about it, trying to snoop and steal my thunder, but the Dark Lord wants ME and I have forced them to stop their coddling…."

"…What? He…you what?"

"That's right, father! ME! Is that not magnificent, father? Is it NOT? I am to vanquish the Mudblood Lover! I have a plan….I can do this…We will be honored beyond our wildest dreams for this, father."

"Albus Dumbledore…?"

"YES, father! At MY hands! MY accomplishment, for us! MINE! I can control him, I can make him hurt for us, for our cause… I can make you PROUD…"

_"It is our CHOICES that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." _

_--Albus Dumbledore, from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, by J,K. Rowling _

_"What is it that you can do?" said Dumbledore._

_"All sorts," said Riddle. "…I can make bad things happen to people who annoy me. I can make them hurt if I want to….I knew I was different… I knew I was special. Always, I knew there was something."_

--_from Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, by J.K.Rowling_

"What? Father, why are you looking at me like that?"

"….God. Surely he could use someone else. I know what this is. My God, Draco."

"WHAT? But father, I thought you would…"

"I want to talk to your mother. And Severus. NOW."

"She didn't come, I didn't tell her, she's already in some fool tizzy over it all, and he's at Hogwarts! I don't NEED them or anyone ELSE, I'm SIXTEEN! The Dark Lord chose ME! ME!"

"EXACTLY. Stop pitching an infantile fit and give me that two-sided mirror, NOW."

"You're STILL ordering me around like scum after I told you THIS? You still think I'm capable of NOTHING? FATHER… look, watch this spider, watch it…. _Crucio…._see it writhing about, father?"

"….I NEVER considered or treated you as 'scum,' Draco. And to perform the Cruciatus on an arachnid—STOP THAT NOW, it's DISTRACTING—is far less complex than performing it on a human. It proves nothing of your competence in the Dark Lord's service. "

"I won't let you do this! I WILL succeed! I'll intercept your message to them! I won't let you talk to them! I'll do it! I WILL DO THIS!"

"YOU WILL DO NO SUCH THING. GIVE ME THAT DAMNED MIRROR."

"HE'LL KILL US IF I DON'T, DAD! ALL OF US!"

"I AM AWARE OF THAT. MUCH MORE THAN I AM AWARE OF ANYTHING ELSE IN THIS MATTER. There might still be time to change the course of this, WITHOUT disobeying the Dark Lord. Give me the God damned mirror."

"I WON'T DISAPPOINT YOU! I won't disappoint ME!"

"…Draco…"

"NO!"

Silence.

The boy had run from the cell. Trainers pounding on filthy, ancient stone floors. Leaving his father to stare at the empty chair where he had been sitting. There was a crack on the bars of the window across from the prison-robe-clad Lucius Malfoy, who stared at it with perverse comfort, in his moment of abandonment, through a tangled matt of once-sleek, once-exquisite white blond hair.

He looked as disheveled as on a certain night when he had visited St Mungo's hospital, and had watched another member of his family spirited off beyond his grasp on a suicide mission.

He had spoken once more, after Draco had gone, the boy having been seized by an alarmingly sudden and apparently excruciating explosion of tears. He had said something beginning with "I" and ending in "you," though it was impossible to fathom, with the desolate wail of the arctic winds, and with Lucius's now bowed head hidden in his white blond mane, what the words in between had been, and whether they had been scathing or tender.

It had always been that way between the father and son.

_"My Lullaby, hung out to dry  
What's up with that?  
It's over  
Where are you, Dad?  
Mum's lookin' sad  
What's up with that?  
It's dark in here_

_Why, bleeding is breathing  
You're hiding underneath the smoke in the room  
Try, bleeding is believing  
I used to_

_My mouth is dry  
Forgot how to cry  
What's up with that?  
You're hurting me  
I'm running fast  
Can't hide the past  
What's up with that?  
You're pushing me_

_Why, bleeding is breathing  
You're hiding underneath the smoke in the room  
Try, bleeding is believing  
I used to  
I used to_

_Why, bleeding is breathing  
You're hiding underneath the smoke in the room  
Try, bleeding is believing  
I saw you crawling on the floor  
Why, bleeding is breathing  
You're hiding underneath the smoke in the room  
Try, bleeding is believing  
I saw you crawling on the floor  
Why, bleeding is breathing  
You're hiding underneath the smoke in the room  
Try, bleeding is believing  
I saw you crawling on the floor"_

_--Natalie Imbruglia_

_"We wizards have mistreated and abused our fellows for far too long, and we are now reaping our reward."—Albus Dumbledore, from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, by J.K. Rowling._

**_EPILOGUE: OR EXPLANATION (whatever you prefer):_**

This fanfiction is unofficially dedicated to my mother, who has every bit of Odile Renard's spirit and intellect and thank GOD, a lot MORE sanity than poor Dr. Renard. It is in good part because of her that I have achieved personal success, a drive to show compassion to others, and a kind of inner state of basic self-satisfaction. "Okayness with self," I guess you could call it, and a sense of being unconditionally loved by at least one person in this world. She is a parent of a caliber far, far too rare. If there were more Peggi Stitts, there would be fewer Adolf Hilters and Lord Voldemorts….

The two purposes of this fanfiction were:

NUMBAH ONE!

Illustrating CAUSE AND EFFECT. Done using the Malfoys and using my fan-created family, the Renards. What we are is neither what we are born with nor what happens to us, but a complex mixture of BOTH. And who is often responsible for calling forth certain innate traits and snuffing others? PARENTS. It all goes back to the child's first ever experience of human interaction, the child's first chance of either experiencing or being foreign to unconditional love—we "shrink-types" call this Primary Attachment, and nine point five out of ten times, the Primary Attachment Figure is a PARENT. The kid is the future, the parent the one who crafts it, and as melodramatic as that sounds, Friend and Reader, it's true.

NUMBAH TWO!

THIS STORY IS NOT SOLELY AN ATTEMPT TO INCITE PITY AND SMYPATHY FOR DRACO (although I for one do pity him greatly, and always have, even when I didn't particularly LIKE his character). NOR DO I CONDONE HIS BIGOTRY, BUT I AM TRYING TO EXPLAIN IT, because we can only gain enlightenment and greater self-examination from learning what CAUSED the worst of us to BECOME so evil. Refer to numbah one! Notice also that the evil didn't BEGIN with Lucius Malfoy—I attempted to write him neither as a cardboard cut out tyrant nor a fully sympathetic and tragic figure. Why? Most likely Lucius was abused, too. And his father before him. And his father before him. And on and on and on. It's a long ominous chain of sorrow, but it's NOT UNBREAKABLE. THERE IS ALWAYS HOPE. This story is a little reminder for those of us who can intercede on behalf of a child and BREAK THAT CHAIN.

That is a VERY concise summary of my objectives. If you ever wanna chat developmental psychology, sociology, or Harry Potter with me, include it in your review.

**_"If we are to teach real peace in this world, and if we are to carry on a real war against war, we shall have to begin with the children." –Mahatma Gandhi_**


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